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RE: Is there a place for Raspberry Pi and other single board computers within the industrial market place?

shabaz — Fri, 24 Apr 2020 17:17:17 GMT

For anyone interested in seeing the RPI-BC enclosure in bits, this is what comes in the RPI-BC kitRPI-BC kit (spares and accessories are orderable separately too):

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The black pieces are PCB supports that the Raspberry Pi snaps onto. The orange pieces are optionally used to act as spring clips on the underside of the enclosure, to clip it to a DIN mounting rail (used in industry). There are also four tamper-indicating stickers supplied for optionally using with the enclosure.

Everything is snap-fit which is great, and easy to disassemble if needed.

RE: Is there a place for Raspberry Pi and other single board computers within the industrial market place?

shabaz — Wed, 22 Apr 2020 15:40:41 GMT

Hi Gary,

I used the RPI-BC enclosure with Pi 4 for this open hardware project called VIKI:

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The RPI-BC is very good, but with the slight limitation was that it was quite small, and the cut-outs were only suitable for 5A 150V connectors (PTSM series)

Some links to it all here:

An Industrial Enclosure for Raspberry Pi

VIKI (Versatile Intelligent Controller for Industry) Schematic, Bill of Materials and Component Placement Diagrams

I like enclosures with panels that are easy-to-machine, especially removable panels like the RPI-BC's front cover.

However, it would be great to see an enclosure that can take more (and 240V capable) connectors than the PTSM series, and if possible more space than the RPI-BC, because I wanted to insert additional PCBs.

In summary, I liked the RPI-BC, it's possibly the best Pi enclosure I have used, although I wished it was a bit larger (and still fairly low-cost! the RPI-BC has a perfect price-point). In the future the VIKI board will be redesigned, and it is an opportunity to use a larger enclosure. Which enclosure would you recommend?

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RE: Is there a place for Raspberry Pi and other single board computers within the industrial market place?

garynelson — Tue, 07 Apr 2020 08:55:03 GMT

Hi Allen,

We have worked with a number of industrial customers who were using the off the shelf Raspberry Pi 3B & 3B+ for their designs and needed an enclosure that sits on a DIN rail with easy access to the ports. The designs have ranged from reporting modules along a production line sending status reports via blue-tooth to a cloud based server, to industrial I/O modules. Our RPI-BC enclosure was the first version released that is purely based on a DIN rail and we have sold 10's of 1000's of them to industrial customers since it's launch. The latest enclosure system we have is our UCS-RPI which is being used by customers designing 4G routers and controllers for lights amongst other things.

I wrote the piece as the evidence we have so far seen is that the Raspberry Pi single board computers have a very strong opportunity in the industrial marketplace without the need for modification in most instances. You'll find the ranges I've mentioned in stock at Farnell and they have been very successful in the sale of the units since adding them to their portfolios.

RE: Is there a place for Raspberry Pi and other single board computers within the industrial market place?

mp2100 — Tue, 07 Apr 2020 02:10:09 GMT

Having a good enclosure is important. I agree. But I’m still thinking about your title of this posting. To have a place in the industrial marketplace, the raspberry Pi used must be industrial. They means rated for wider temperatures. A DIN rsil enclosure won’t help with that. There are Pi boards that are better for industry (compute module) amd yes, that model needs an industrial case on a Din rail.