Engineering Constraints -- power up and power down.

Over the last couple of days there have been several threads about
powering the BBB up and powering it down. Please correct me if I am
wrong:

1. Currently, there is no assurance that powering headers during power
up will not damage the board.

2. Currently, there is no assurance that pulling the plug will result
in a clean shut down.

These were decisions Gerald made during the design of the device to
reduce board complexity... and price.

Rather than "This Sucks" the discussion should be, is every BBB users
willing to pay X dollars more for these features.

David

And are they willing to give up their Altoids box form factor. It will take more board space to add in these features.

Gerald

I find it odd, users just don't get this 2nd point. There are "things"
we could do to make it survive an un-clean shutdown (such as read only
file system setup). But I'm not designing your final "product", we are
giving you a development system to run your applications on. It's up
to you to bullet proof the software, or if your unable to do that, you
can pay ($) some consultant to do it.

Regards,

Over the last couple of days there have been several threads about
powering the BBB up and powering it down. Please correct me if I am
wrong:

1. Currently, there is no assurance that powering headers during power
up will not damage the board.

2. Currently, there is no assurance that pulling the plug will result
in a clean shut down.

I find it odd, users just don't get this 2nd point. There are "things"
we could do to make it survive an un-clean shutdown (such as read only
file system setup). But I'm not designing your final "product", we are
giving you a development system to run your applications on. It's up
to you to bullet proof the software, or if your unable to do that, you
can pay ($) some consultant to do it.

Robert you are exactly right. Even more importantly, solutions to these
problems have been discussed on this mailing list. All anyone has to do is
search google groups for these solutions.

Regards,
John

Of course he is right, and this should be common knowledge / sense to everyone. What happens when you just pull the plug on ANY computer while an OS is running ? Maybe nothing, to start with. But eventually, you’re going to have a problem.

Windows will likely “fail silently” as in it will not let you know a problem on your disk exists( unless you caused a boot loader issue), until things become very unstable over time to the point you have to find the problem / cure yourself. Usually this calls for chkdsk, which has to be run on the OS partition at boot (can not be done with the OS running live ).

Linux from my experience will complain very loudly at boot, and may / may not run properly afterwards,

Anyway, it should be obvious that the BBB is a development board. And IMHO a very good one especially considering the price. So, if some dufus comes onto the groups here pissing and moaning about how x.y.z isnt perfect for them. Well you know what ? They are not the target audience anyhow. I kind of view these types as children who try stamping their feet trying to get what they want. Which personally I have no patience for.

Thank you Gerald, Robert, and the many others in the community for making an excellent dev board.