[colug-432] Raspberry Pi duty cycle

[Eric Floehr]

Scott,

I'm not a hardware expert, but have been dabbling ever since my Dad and I
soldered a Heathkit way back when.

I would think the biggest determiner of longevity of the Raspberry Pi would
be heat. My RPi does get warm when it is doing a lot of work. There is not
even a passive heat sink on the CPU/GPU. So possibly thermal
expansion/contraction causing shorts.

Another thing could be capacitor degradation.   Obviously the design
decisions made on the RPi were to keep the cost extremely low... it's an
educational device.  Perhaps due to cost they selected caps that were near
the rated charge they needed and a small degradation in performance will
affect proper functioning of the circuit.

Other than that, I'm not sure what would really fail on the RPi...but I'm
not an expert.

-Eric



On Tue, Apr 2, 2013 at 11:15 AM, Scott Merrill <skippy at skippy.net> wrote:

> Someone told me recently that Raspberry Pis are not designed for 24/7
> operation.
>
> If one were to run a RasPi continuously, how would that effect that
> longevity of the device?
>
> I suspect the answer is "it depends" on things like workload,
> computational complexity, frequency of disk writes, etc. For the
> purpose of this thought experiment, let's assume the RasPi would not
> be doing anything terribly computationally complex, and wouldn't have
> excessive disk writes.
>
> Thanks.
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