Raspberry Pi to Deliver a Modular Device for Businesses

As we've reported many times, the diminutive $25/$35 Linux computer dubbed Raspberry Pi has emerged as one of the biggest open source stories anywhere over the past couple of years. It's attracted all kinds of developers and tinkerers, is now running many different flavors of Linux, and there is even now a supercomputer consisting of many Pi devices lashed together with Lego pieces. In some of the more exotic new applications for Raspberry Pi, it's being used in music, robotics and security scenarios.

Now, news comes from the folks behind the Pi that later this year they will ship a new hardware product, which will be a smaller board that plugs into a custom motherboard slot. It could find an audience with enthusiasts, but also enterprises. 

There has been a lot of Raspberry Pi news lately, including the launch of a new website, free educational materials and a £1m education fund. According to the latest announcement:

"On the engineering side of things we’ve also been very busy over the past year, and not to be outdone by the education team, we are ready to take the wraps off something special, this time aimed at business and industrial users."

"Like proud parents, we want to free the core technology of the Raspberry Pi to go forth and become an integral part of new and exciting products and devices, and so today we are announcing the forthcoming Raspberry Pi Compute Module. The compute module contains the guts of a Raspberry Pi (the BCM2835 processor and 512Mbyte of RAM) as well as a 4Gbyte eMMC Flash device (which is the equivalent of the SD card in the Pi). This is all integrated on to a small 67.6x30mm board which fits into a standard DDR2 SODIMM connector (the same type of connector as used for laptop memory*). The Flash memory is connected directly to the processor on the board, but the remaining processor interfaces are available to the user via the connector pins. You get the full flexibility of the BCM2835 SoC (which means that many more GPIOs and interfaces are available as compared to the Raspberry Pi), and designing the module into a custom system should be relatively straightforward as we’ve put all the tricky bits onto the module itself."

Millions of units of the existing Raspberry Pi devices have sold, and schools and hobbyists have been big buyers. Bit the new Compute Module could find a home in businesses. You can read much more about it here, and OStatic will follow up as this new product comes to fruition.