By Brian Santo, contributing writer
Last year, the Raspberry Pi Foundation delivered the third model of its professional-grade Raspberry Pi board. The Compute Module 3 (CM3) is a testament to the accelerating use of the commercial-grade version of the board in a broad cross-section of products that range from industrial automation and control to consumer electronics.
You might not have heard about this widespread adoption, however. The Raspberry Pi Foundation is restrictive about the use of the Raspberry Pi trademark in commercial marketing and promotion. Meanwhile, many companies consider their use of Pi to be competitive information and decline to talk about it. Consequently, professional applications of Raspberry Pi tend to remain unpublicized. However, there are certainly hundreds of examples, and maybe thousands, with more coming. The Raspberry Pi Foundation said that roughly one-third of the Pis that it sells go to commercial applications.
Raspberry Pi resellers are seeing increased demand as well. “In a given month, the Compute Module will be 5% to 10% of our Raspberry Pi sales,” said Peter Wenzel, global director of Raspberry Pi products at element 14, one of the leading purveyors of Raspberry Pi products. “It’s growing, and we can’t forecast its growth enough.”
Raspberry Pi was created for children to learn basic digital system design skills. The idea was to specify a basic board that would be simple but not so rudimentary as to be a toy. Raspberry Pi boards are designed to have more than adequate computation power to support a wide range of real-world applications as well as to be inexpensive and easy to use. It just so happens that those are some of the requirements for many commercial applications — so why not use it for commercial applications?
At first, it wasn’t possible due to a lack of popular communications options and on-board memory, an inability to operate across the full temperature range typically specified for commercial products, and minimal flexibility for modification.
All of that began to change with the introduction of the first Compute Module in 2014. It had some drawbacks for professional use, including the fact that the Broadcom chip ran a little too hot. But those drawbacks were addressed by the time CM3 was introduced in 2017. The Raspberry Pi 3 had become quite attractive for professional and/or commercial use.
“So, what actually gives the Raspberry Pi 3 a significant leg up over smaller microcontroller boards? The key is the Broadcom BCM2837 — a microprocessor that has some unique advantages,” according to Nick Powers , an application marketing manager at Arrow Electronics, who evaluated the product when it came out. “The actual core is an Arm Cortex-A53, which features heaps of cache and floating-point units that help to speed up data manipulation, especially in advanced mathematics and graphics.”
There are a couple of versions of the CM3. They both use Broadcom’s BCM2837 processor at up to 1.2 GHz and pack 1 GB of RAM. The standard version has 4 GB of on-board eMMC flash, while the Lite version is more stripped down, including bringing the SD card interface to the module pins so that users can connect to an eMMC or SD card of their choice, according to the Raspberry Pi Foundation. The versions are priced at $30 and $25, respectively.
Newark element14 (a subsidiary of Premier Farnell) sells the boards as specified by Raspberry Pi and also creates variations. Its most recent is the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ , built on a new quad-core Broadcom BCM2837 64-bit processor running at 1.4 GHz and featuring wireless connectivity (IEEE 802.11ac Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.2) and better thermal management, among other changes. Model Bs are standard products, but the company will also build custom variations specified by customers. Wenzel said that Newark element14 has the only license to do that. Newark element14 recently began marketing a development kit as well.
The combination of technical merits and low price make the CM3 attractive, but sometimes it’s just the ease of use. Because it’s so easy to use, explained Wenzel, it’s often considered for projects that need to be completed quickly. One of the 10 largest banks in the U.S. chose Raspberry Pi for precisely that reason when it wanted to upgrade its ATMs to support a new feature. Wenzel declined to identify the bank in part because it ultimately decided against the upgrade for business and not for technical reasons.
Raspberry Pi was invented for kids, and even if there is a version aimed at professionals, it’s a bit of disservice to not describe the range of applications as fun bordering on bonkers.
The survey of commercial uses of Raspberry Pi that follows includes examples provided by the Raspberry Pi Foundation, Newark element14, Comfile Technology, and Kunbus.
Sorting cucumbers
A family farm in Japan is using a system based on Raspberry Pi to sort its thorny cucumbers, according to the Raspberry Pi Foundation. The sorter was created by the proprietors’ son, Makoto Koike, whose full-time job is as an embedded systems designer for a company in the Japanese automotive industry.
Wenzel told Electronic Products that the Compute Module requires some design experience to use it.
The cucumbers require sorting because the straightest, thickest, and thorniest cucumbers can be sold at a higher price. In fact, there are nine categories of relative desirability into which the cucumbers can be sorted. Koike’s system incorporates machine learning. He trained the system using 7,000 photos of cucumbers that he had taken and categorized. The system has an accuracy rate in excess of 95%, but during real-world use, it drops to about 70%.
Supercomputing clusters
Automating and accelerating the sorting of thorny cucumbers might be consequential for thorny cucumber growers, but when you get right down to it, they are cucumbers . You want a serious example? How about supercomputer development?
When it comes to supercomputers, Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) is about as serious as you can get. The organization’s Trinity machines typically rank among the 10 fastest supercomputers in the world. The problem is that no one conducting supercomputer R&D (on parallel computing architectures, operating systems, applications, etc.) can afford a Top-10 petascale supercomputer, and running R&D tests on Trinity is a waste of resources. What was needed, then, was a testbed.
Bitscope received a call to build a testbed that would have a massive number of nodes (similar to Trinity) but still be inexpensive. BitScope built five Pi Cluster Modules, each with 150 four-core nodes of Raspberry Pi Arm processor boards. With a total of 750 CPUs (or 3,000 cores) working together, “the system gives developers exclusive time on an inexpensive but highly parallelized platform for test and validation of scalable systems software technologies,” according to LANL .
Keep in mind that a cheap supercomputer will put an eight-figure dent in your bank account. Bitscope said that it can build a 1,000-node cluster that can be used as a testbed for less than $150 per node.
The BitScope Pi Cluster Modules system is comprised of five rack-mounted BitScope Pi Cluster Modules consisting of 3,000 cores using Raspberry Pi Arm processor boards, fully integrated with network switching infrastructure. (Image: BitScope)
Underwater drone exploration
OpenROV builds submersible drones for underwater exploration. They can explore for three hours, providing a high-definition (HD) feed for the duration. The top-of-the-line Trident model reaches a depth of 100 meters.
The Trident drone is based on a custom Raspberry Pi board created by Newark element14. As OpenROV company’s co-founder Eric Stackpole told Newark element14 , “We needed to fit everything into a very small package, so we needed a version of the Raspberry Pi that didn’t have the headers, USB ports, Ethernet jack, and some other large components, so they worked with us to make a stripped-down version that’s very thin.”
Tridents aren’t for sale yet, but the company is taking orders. The basic drone, good down to 25 meters, is priced at $1,500, while the 100-meter model costs $2,050. The company sells a separate $400 Android-based controller.
Industrial control
There are several companies building controllers and gateways based on the Raspberry Pi Compute Module. One example is Kunbus, a German company that built its Revolution Pi (aka RevPi) product line of controllers based on CMs.
The Kunbus Revolution Pi is an industrial PC based on the Raspberry Pi. The image shows the base module RevPi Core 3 dismantled into its components. In the middle is the Raspberry Pi Compute Module (Image: Kunbus)
If there’s any doubt that a Raspberry Pi-based product is industrial-grade, Revolution Pis conform to the IEC’s 61131-2 open international standard for programmable controllers.
One user of RevPi modules is Oxygen Technologies. When energy customers generate their own solar power and are connected to the grid, it creates some grid management challenges. Oxygen Technologies is trying to solve this problem.
Kunbus describes how Oxygen Technologies is running a system in which private and commercial electricity producers can trade their electricity among each other without any middlemen (Oxygen’s explanation is in German). The approach relies on everyone having a gateway that can relay consumption and production data at each node. Oxygen chose the gateway version of Kunbus’ RevPi.
Other uses
There are a host of uses for the CM3, ranging from web hosting to smart mirrors.
Web hosting — When you sign up with ISP Mythic Beasts , you get a dedicated Raspberry Pi server backed by network storage. Mythic Beasts drily notes: “This is a beta service and shouldn’t be used for nuclear power station command and control systems.” Best advice you’ll get today.
Home automation and control — FutureHome, based in Oslo, specializes in smart home technology that it sells to both individual homeowners and homebuilders in Norway. The FutureHome system is centered on a hub unit that Wenzel said is based on the Raspberry Pi CM.
Mirror computer displays — AirNodes is a French company that describes itself as a design operation that specializes in IoT applications. One of its most recent products is the Anna Smart Mirror for the hospitality and retail industries. This is another project based on Raspberry Pi, according to Wenzel.
Industrial control applications — Comfile Technology has created a panel PC based on the Raspberry Pi CM that includes a 24-bit color LCD with a touchscreen and a set of ports (USB, Ethernet, RS-232). A company spokesman was not able to identify any of the customers of its panel PC by name but did provide a list of the businesses that they are engaged in. These include:
- Manufacturers of hydraulic presses
- Sand molding
- Manufacturing of HVAC systems
- Prop and model making
- Manufacturers of high-voltage contacts, capacitors, and relays
- Manufacturers of high-precision scientific measurement equipment
- Lobster fishing and processing
- Automated vehicle and safety systems
- Robotics and sound system manufacturers
- Signal systems for light and freight railways
For more in-depth information on applying the Raspberry Pi in commercial applications, check out these other articles in this AspenCore Special Project:
Raspberry Pi Quietly Entering Professional Service — The Raspberry Pi’s combination of computer power and low cost has been attracting the interest of professional designers looking for quicker solutions to complex applications.
Beginner’s Guide to Sensor Interfacing — PIC, Arduino, and Raspberry Pi: If you can work with these three types of systems, then you can connect with just about anything.
Design solutions: Latest MEMS and Sensor signal conditioning architectures — Signal conditioning options include not only analog operational amplifier solutions but discrete transistor, data converter, microcontroller, and algorithm-based solutions as well.
Tip of the HAT to the RasPi — A Discussion on the Pi HAT Hardware Specification — The most versatile and powerful way of adding hardware functionality to the Raspberry Pi is to give it a HAT.
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