Open Source vs Commercial Hardware | Simplexity Product Development

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The Arduino and boards like the BeagleBone Black, and Raspberry Pi, are great low-cost embedded systems.
When you’re prototyping they’re a wonderful option.
But if you have a product that you’re going to ship to a customer, and maybe do that in volume, there are other factors you may want to consider.

Does the board have everything you need in a single PCA?
Capes are great for flexibility but don’t offer the most secure electrical connection and can lead to very difficult to find intermittent connections in the field.
Do you have assurance of supply?
The open-source world moves very quickly and the board that you buy today may not be available in a year when you need to ship another one to a customer.

Does the board have any sort of regulatory certification?
Development boards aren't required to be certified by the FCC, but if you’re going to ship to customers, you need certification.
If you use an open-source board yet find you have to make changes to meet certification requirements, you can go through a costly cycle of design updates and lose the cost advantages you get in open-source hardware.
What sort of support is available for the project you’re working on?
The open-source community typically does a wonderful job of offering support for active projects, but if the developer of the project moves on, are you going to be left in a lurch?
Commercial vendors typically offer technical support for a defined lifetime of the product.

Finally there’s the issue of intellectual property.
Open-source software, while very powerful, can be a literal minefield of IP problems waiting for you to step on.
A commercial offering, while it may include some open-source software, will typically research and define exactly what you need to do to be in compliance with open-source licenses.

Simplexity provides engineering design services across a range of industries. Our "simpler is better" engineering approach reduces costs while improving the lifecycle of your product, saving you money in development, manufacturing and product sustainability. We understand the most important challenges which is why we have mastered cost reduction while maintaining the most innovative industrial, consumer, and biotech engineering solutions.