Hello,
Is there any to consider, if we use an Arduino-board for commercial and professional projects?
Right now we are thinking to use Arduino-boards. In case we should consider professional boards, because we will use them in a commercial way.
Thank you in advance
Most of arduino boards designed for learning and perhaps won't be as effective as required for professional use.
I think better to design a custom board with desired elements
Look at the type of certification you’ll need when selling your product embedding the arduino board. That’s going to be your one if your main decision factor.
It is usually cheaper in the long run to use your own board / PCB (think support, warranty, costs of unused elements…) and you are in charge of the BOM and don’t rely on commercial products that can disappear based on decisions you don’t make.
But of course it depends if you plan to sell a few 10s or hundreds of thousands units if your product and to which market.
You can get "hardened" Arduinos with io protection, etc. I wouldn't use 'em in anything "life critical" like med dosing or somesuch, but for monitoring or any non-life-ctitical app, sure.
Fab is an issue since most breakout boards vary in size/connector/availability/cost from day to day. You get what you pay for, bottom dollar parts, bottom dollar quality and LOTS of variation.
I try to buy from a known vendor that will back the parts.
One good part vendor is Velleman. Their quality is consistently high as is their online docs. Yes, they're not the cheapest, but they work consistently and appear to be very uniform.
As has been said, for volume you would design a PCB. But for lower volume & prototyping screw terminal shields are the way to go. Here is a pic of a cpu sandwich. 3D printed mount, Mega 2560, Screw Terminal Shield, custom Power Distribution Board. But as a unit, this can be programmed and pre wired, ready to drop into whatever you can imagine:
Ready to plug and chug. Cost? $20 mega, $15 terminal shield, $15 PDB + 3/4 hr fab, $0.25 filament + 90 min 3d print time, so total, about $60/ea. qty 1.
You can also get din rail mounts.
Take a search engine of your choice and ask the WWW for 'controllino".
Or make your own boards with bare processors - will work out cheaper and look more professional .
There are people here who who lay a board out for you ( not me tho ) for a few chocolate bars .
Arduino produces a quality board, but the board is layout for hobby use; still, you can easily use them in low-volume runs of some product you wish to sell.
one of out respected forum members did not make it through COVID but his family still runs his small business for designing and selling Arduino compatible boards. I own several... highly recommend:
Cross Roads Home (crossroadsfencing.com)
My fav:
This topic was automatically closed 180 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.
