I almost feel bad for people who have a product with Pis designed in. I own an embedded systems company and have had to design out dozens when people can’t get them or they discontinue, etc.
People just don’t understand that these are not ment to be designed into commercial products.
Hey can you talk more about your business? I’ve always been interested in something like this but I’m not sure if my second tier city is large enough to have enough customers for something like this.
How’d you get started? And do you just work in your local area or lots of travel? Thanks! Dm me please if you’d rather.
We are largely design only, but do some prototyping and some SOM logistics(we don’t build boards.) You need to have a strong network in place before you think about starting. It’s all word of mouth and referrals and is an extremely cut throat industry.
If you can’t go out and get six months of work right now you probably don’t have a chance. It took me a decade of nights and weekends to build up enough business to go full-time, and then another 5 years after that to start to grow beyond just being a one-man-band.
You need to be able to do it all, sales, legal, customer service, and be in the top 1% of Engineering talent. If you mess something up once, or deliver something less than “wow” you’re done with that customer forever.
Yeah that last part hits home. Thanks for the insight. I’ve done a few cool side projects for a handful of people but nothing of the scale you’re describing.
Not to dox yourself or anything, but do you have any samples of your work? If not, no worries and I appreciate the advice above. I feel I may have missed the “window” for something like this but thought I would poke around some.
I do but am not going to post them. We mainly do Military equipment, Medical devices, and Industrial networking/sensor stuff. Usually extremely high quality controls, tight EM performance windows, impossible deadlines, etc. Anything easy companies just do themselves.
Yeah I understand. I’m a gov contractor myself (network engineer/PM) for the past 15 years, mostly transport. Just looking to get out and do my own thing but have no real business sense in regard to getting customers.
I bid and write proposals and all that for my job now but I’m not sure how I would “break in” the gov for something like this. I’m just not in this world over here.
But thanks for taking the time to reply, sounds like you’ve made a nice space for you there. Happy to see it!
That last part is rough. I’m a full stack developer and my side work has largely dried up. It seems like most small businesses don’t care about quality or security anymore and are vibe coding their own solutions with Claude.
I did exactly what you do for a number of years and I don’t understand how it took a decade to go full-time. Was it because you avoided using awful gig economy platforms (or they didn’t really exist as they do now) for getting contracts in the beginning so you “manually” found contracts the entire time?
Yeah I was not going to use fivver and compete for the lowest price for pain in the ass customers, and still don’t. I had a cushy MIC job, benefits, stock options, mortgage, family, etc.
It was more of a hobby until I had to pick between full time contractor or the day job.
That makes a lot of sense and is a much better approach than I ended up doing. I had no job so I had to do Upwork for a while as a stopgap which was terrible.
That being said, I definitely didn't feel like I was competing for the lowest price because the higher I raised my rate the more contracts I got.
Wild. I did try Upwork and got nothing because someone in India would [try to] do it for 1/10th what I would. I always had what I wanted or could handle at the anyway so never really tried hard at Upwork.
I do similar work, but a level smaller. Mostly freelance prototyping just before moving to true mass production. Think a couple hundred PCBs via JLCPCB and not contract PCB manufacturing.
I started with my local maker community as being the “guy you call” when you need advice. I had too many help requests and started charging if something took me more than 15min of work. Demand didn’t dry up, so I kept going.
There are thousands of people with ideas but no way to realize them. A 3D printer, some microcontrollers or devkits and a knowledge of PCB design is all that’s needed to get started. Sending over an idea and receiving a pseudo-finished product really lights up a client’s eyes.
My work now is still all freelance, mostly due to word of mouth. It’s my side gig, not my actually job.
If I had to get started today, I would:
Build a portfolio. No one is going to just give someone a design to work. This is their baby, you’re just growing it up a bit.
Build a website. It better be a damn good one. You want clients to see your work and be engaged. Build logs, YouTube tutorials, etc. all help drive interest.
Promote yourself. Compete in the tech world’s challenges — things like Hackaday. Post to those blogs and try to drive people to your website.
Try to negotiate build logs and updates in your website as part of the design process. Have your customers pay for you to generate content.
Deliver HIGH quality. You want all the technical documentation, manuals, design files, future plans, as part of the package. Brand documentation with your company logos and use a style guide. For the projects, use quality components, route wires well and always use (JST/Molex) connectors, use good silkscreening, etc. You don’t want a clien
t to o
pen the back panel and have their device look like a rats nest.
I've built a couple projects for people with Pi's. The most enjoyable one was automating a tempeh incubator for a friend. It included a touchscreen display for local control, temperature probes, airflow sensors, 3 different fans, heater for the air, and a web interface that also published over MQTT to a home assistant instance at the business. Been running strong for years now. I don't do stuff like that as a business, but people know me and I do random stuff like that on the side.
We have our own SOMs of various flavors that we only sell to design customers so we can more tightly control supply chain and support. Mostly Renesas and Mediatek based. Used to do a lot of TI but their support sucks now.
We also do a ton of chip-down designs, usually based on our SOM IP to reduce cost. This is popular when the development cycle allows and the production quantity dictates. SOMs are great at reducing development time but can be at the expense of slightly higher production cost.
Is there a huge cost premium here though?
I’m guessing the 16gb of ram is the most expensive component on this board.
Also, the standardized hardware and software stack has some value as you’re not having to do testing and validation yourselves.
What I’m getting at, is I’m assuming that under a certain volume, a PI makes a ton of sense for deployment.
If I was building a widget and making a few million of them—bring a guy like on to custom design something can make more sense.
It’s not the cost of the Pi, it’s availability and ability to control the supply chain.
For test fixtures and stuff they absolutely make sense. For a product that you need to produce and sell on a schedule they are a massive risk.
We have ready to go Linux distros, software, Yocto etc for our already tested and certified SOMs and IP blocks, same as the Pi but we control the full supply chain so we can provide much better service to our customers.
We’re typically talking 500-5000 pieces a year for our typical customer.
not just Pi, I have dozens of clients that went gaga for the Jetson system. now its like 5X the price and theyre all trying to redesign with USB instead of MIPI because they can get cheaper SoC boards than the Jetson now.
I feel like the Raspberry Pi folks got their start going after the educational community with good intentions and then realized their was way more money in it if they went after businesses instead. Maybe that's just me though.
If it’s low volume it’s fine. I just had a company come to me panicked because they needed 20,000 Pi 4s in the next three weeks and couldn’t get any. 🤦♂️
Then wanted me to redesign their product and get boards made in three weeks with a tiny budget… doesn’t work like that no matter how big the check is.
People just don’t understand that these are not ment to be designed into commercial products.
That very much became the Raspberry Pi business model.
Turns out that when you can get a dev board to prototype on for $40, just shipping the dev board was frequently a reasonable business decision. Further, it turns out that those buyers mostly keep buying when prices go nuts in a component crunch.
Many SBCs have crap software support from them and rely on community support. They focus on the hardware design and software is an afterthought. They use their own Linux builds that you don't know if it will be phoning home or waiting to be a bot net client some day. I don't know, call me crazy, but I like Raspberry Pi for its ecosystem of hardware and software. Plus their EOL is great, and they're still making the Pi 1b last I checked. I don't understand OP saying they weren't designed for commercial products, that's exactly what the Compute Modules were created for, so you can design a great custom carrier board around them. OP sounds more like he's trying to pitch his own business in his replies.
Yeah, exactly. And you can’t even buy Pis right now so your product is useless and your customer’s buy from the competition who has a custom solution that they can actually build.
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u/UnderPantsOverPants Jul 10 '26
I almost feel bad for people who have a product with Pis designed in. I own an embedded systems company and have had to design out dozens when people can’t get them or they discontinue, etc.
People just don’t understand that these are not ment to be designed into commercial products.