Opinion Poll: Proliferation of Prefbricated Parts

[GreyingJay]

My thoughts: Industry is trending in this direction. When I started at my company in 2005 I was on a particular project for military grade equipment. Everything about the hardware was custom designed including the chassis, the cooling system, the custom PowerPC based processor cards running VxWorks. Installing the software required hooking up to this box with a laptop over a serial cable and flashing the box with the custom boot image.

Now, 10 years later, the modern version of this box is basically: a standard intel PC, packaged in a rugged enclosure. Install a standard flavour of Linux. Deploy the software as a Linux RPM. It is so much simpler and allows us to focus on the "real" problems (bugs in our software) rather than get hung up on configuring, modifying, repairing hardware and lab equipment.

Knowing when to invent your own and knowing when to go with an established solution is itself an important design skill.