In our lab we have 8-9 Beaglebone Black units. We are using them to control high intensity lights, with circuits in the 7A/9V neighborhood. The circuits are simple, using mosfets to control the high power circuits. There is water in our environment but we protect our electronics pretty well, through both design and procedure. It's warm (~80F) but not particularly humid. We haven't really measured the humidity but I'm reasonably comfortable here.
We've had three of our boards fail in different ways: One is an element14 board that boots ok, but reproducibly gives a mysterious error on install from source of Python 2.7.11 (a requirement for us, long ugly story). I've tried to reflash with an SD card and it seems unresponsive whether I hold down the S2 button or not. Damaged SD card socket? Linux does see the SD card's filesystem. It just refuses to boot from it. Maybe a damaged S2 button? Another element14 one seems to overheat. With an IR camera, we've seen the power regulator spike over 60C. It has frozen up on us a couple times if we let it run--lights stop blinking, network goes unresponsive, but does not appear to power off. Another has a Beaglebone logo with the text ''beagleboard.org' silkscreened on it (CircuitCo? It's close but not identical to the logo I see on their board on Adafruit). It shut down mysteriously. W have rebooted a couple times since and seen diminishing uptimes. Most recently it didn't finish rebooting at all. The rest seem to run OK. We have had other failures related to other electronics. These ones seem hardware related, within the BBB. These have all been bought in 2016, I think. We've bought them through Adafruit and Amazon when they were out of stock. A few questions come to mind: 1. we are looking at scaling up at some point. 35%-ish failure rates for microcontrollers over six months are not going to work for us in the long term. *Is this normal for Beaglebone Blacks?* We already handle these units pretty carefully. Maybe we could do more, though it's hard to say what. If we can't get it under control we might want to find another board to standardize on. The BBB has a lot of features we need--we'd prefer not to leave it if possible. 2. The industrial BBBs seem to address higher temperature, though we don't expose ours to extremes of temperature (that they don't generate on their own anyway). *Might the higher quality parts provide higher reliability in general?* 3. *Also, could we expect better customer service with industrial BBBs? * 4. *What could we expect in general with industrial units?* -- For more options, visit http://beagleboard.org/discuss --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "BeagleBoard" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to beagleboard+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/beagleboard/f8142c48-dc50-4ea9-9fab-2e3ea0ef10dd%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
