The Raspberry Pi Foundation has announced support for industrial customers using the Raspberry Pi in production settings.
The new materials include industry-specific tutorials, datasheets, and documents regarding compliance and regulation requirements for electronic equipment.
Industrial Raspberry Pi Users Get Official Support
More support for industrial partners has been in the pipeline for some time, given that 44% of all Raspberry Pis are sold to industrial customers. Up to 15 million of the powerful single-board computers get used in various forms of manufacturing and automated quality control.
Alongside the traditional form factor Raspberry Pi boards, many types of industrial control use Raspberry Pi Compute Modules as the mainboard for custom machinery.
Information for professional users can now be found on the For Industry pages of the Raspberry Pi foundation’s website.
Raspberry Pi Principle Engineer Roger Thornton explains the new support in a post on the Raspberry Pi blog:
To support Raspberry Pi’s industrial customers, we have developed a new, dedicated area of our website. Our For industry pages are the best place to go for industrial applications of Raspberry Pi. They provide access to the information and support you need when using our products in an industrial setting, with links to datasheets, compliance documents, and more.
The post goes on to confirm long term support for all Raspberry Pi products until at least 2026, and introduce the Raspberry Pi Integrator Program – designed to help businesses bring Raspberry Pi products to the market.
Official Raspberry Pi Design Partnerships
Alongside the new guidelines, The Raspberry Pi Foundation is starting an initiative connecting businesses and individuals with design ideas to approved specialist designers.
The Raspberry Pi Approved Design Partners program currently has a small selection of companies who each specialize in equipment and tool design using Raspberry Pi products. The foundation hopes to expand this list, and if your business provides Pi-based hardware or software you can apply to become an approved design partner through the Raspberry Pi Foundation.
Automating Industry One Pi at a time
One of the things that made the Raspberry Pi so popular is the ability to slot it into so many environments and let it automate tasks that previously required human interaction or complicated circuitry and microprocessors to carry out.
Reprogrammable mini-computers with general-purpose input/output (GPIO) pins for sensing and control are incredibly extensible, and the Raspberry Pi was rightfully adopted by almost every sector. One is even in use on the International Space Station.
Companies like Comfile create purpose-built industrial housings for Raspberry Pi products, tough enough to survive in a factory, but accessible enough to use wearing gloves. A central place to access all the compliance information about Raspberry Pi products will be a welcome thing indeed for many similar manufacturers.
Perhaps more exciting is the prospect of standardization across the Raspberry Pi ecosystem. More companies creating compliant devices means a great toolset for open source manufacturing as a whole.
That open-source Linux self-driving car pipe dream just got ever so slightly closer to being a reality.