[sangd]

I have had 4 different RPi boards in the past including the latest and the pi zero, and every single of them failed to work reliably. The hardware design and quality are poor. One of my board had soldering issue, another has power supply issue, another has SD card reader issue. You would run into lots of tough ones. Software eco is mostly for playing around. There're lots of frustration around but no good answers. I like the idea, I like its motivation, but they need to focus on the core values and make it work well. I up-voted because I still think that it has good values for kids.

[elagost]

Curious what you mean by "Software eco is mostly for playing around". They run full Debian, and despite the limited I/O throughput, there are a number of relatively high profile projects that are widely used. Most people I know with one run pi-hole, openvpn, a cacti system, etc. I personally run Syncthing, pi-hole, openvpn, and an internal webserver that hosts movies/tv from an attached drive. It's pretty decent as a NAS too. You can apt-get install and/or compile whatever you want on them. I've also used one to coreboot my laptop with the GPIO output.

[_ea1k]

I'm surprised to hear of so many issues. Like the other commenter, I have used a couple of them for everything from home automation and network storage, to an openwrt router.

I worry a bit about the SD cards (especially with the zero, which is really being overworked), but overall I haven't really had any issues.

[classic959]

I have 4 RPi's in frequent use. The one in my kitchen (music player, Pi 2 model B) needs a clothes peg to squeeze the SD card into the reader otherwise it won't boot. So that's a 25% failure rate for me as far as hardware issues are concerned.

It has worked reliably for a few years with the clothes peg though!

[sangd]

If you have set up the board for a single purpose and let it run, I think it may last for some time. I constantly switching different SD cards for different OSes with different configuration and software updates. Maybe that would result in something different from you guys? My soldering problem is visible through bare eyes. What RPi should have done is to design a complete system from power supply, USB hubs/dongles, video adapters, wifi/bluetooth adapters. I went through a bunch of them and it got me really frustrated trying different USB hubs/power supplies (1 works out of 4 hubs), and I am not sure the reason why (I got 3 external power supply on 3 out of 4 hubs).

[thinkmassive]

How do you know the problem is the boards? Many people have had issues with SD cards and power supplies, but I don’t recall ever hearing of a bad RPi before.