Custom Board vs Specialized Company for Raspberry Pi Replacement in Portable Device

Dear all, I hope this is the right place to ask about this.

My startup company is working on a portable device which integrates a single board computing unity to process information from multiple micro cameras.

We have been using a Raspberry Pi running linux during the prototyping stage.
We now want to create a custom board/chip for the consumer version of our product and are looking to both diminish the size and costs of it's components.

What do you suggest is the best solution for a small company like mine in order to do this? Should we hire a hardware design engineer or find a specialized company that creates custom boards and deals with product design? Would this be more economical? and if so, could you name a company that deals with similar projects?

Thank you so much and please excuse me for not sharing much information about the project.
 

In either case, you need to engage with a company that will do the board loading, they must be able to offer advice on design for manufacturing, which covers PCB design and components selection.
That company may or may not have engineering staff that can design your board.
Note that the RaPi board has already been through this process, and is manufactured in large quantities, so you may not get your processing board any cheaper.
You need to find who does this sort of work in your region, and talk to them, and you should also be able to talk to some of their customers and look at products they have done.
The option of your own engineer or a company is a difficult one. In either case you need to look at their previous work (actual hardware). It may depend on what you are most comfortable with, if you can find the right person or company. In employing a person, you have them working beside you, and you need to make a direct investment in them and the tools they need to do the work, and it may be easier than dealing with a rather more anonymous company which will often will have its own priorities, but may have years of collective expertise behind them.
Sorry I can't be more specific,
cheers,
Richard

I have been through several of these projects, and the bottom line is: unless you are going to manufacture in high volumes (>10K typically), build an add-on board for an existing SBC, don't try to reinvent the SBC layout.

The current makers of the SBCs are already well down the volume ramp, and they are often very low margin sales so even with the cost of design and testing building a cheaper board is very difficult.

If you make an add-on board, you can often get away with a 2 or 4 layer board with low cost trace spacings, no laser drilled vias, no tenting, no BGA packages, no need for X-ray inspection, etc etc etc. You also eliminate a lot of the high risk engineering (SDRAM layout, etc) not to mention you don't have to wear the design cost of the processor board.

If you can't embed a raspberry pi or similar, take a look at the many SO-DIMM, MXM and other modules from companies like Variscite that will provide a more professional appearance during a tear-down. There are also modules like the FriendlyArm Exynos modules and the marsboard CM-A20 (among others) that provide a module without "coastline" connectors (ethernet, etc) allowing you to implement whatever you want on your base board. These two sets of modules also use 50mil pin headers do you don't have to deal with fine pitch board stacking connectors.

Great advices guys!

Thank you so much