The single-board Raspberry Pi computer was designed as an educational tool, and more than 10 million have already been sold worldwide. Small electrical devices and peripherals such as LEDs and pushbuttons can be connected to the Pi’s 40-pin GPIO connector via breadboards and wires to build hobby-level monitoring and control applications.
But larger electrical loads can destroy the Raspberry Pi, and the lack of industrial-level I/O has meant that “the Pi has been stuck in the education and prototyping realms, unable to be fully leveraged in everyday commercial and industrial applications”, according to Opto 22.
Raspberry Pi developers will now be able to attach their Pi to the new carrier board, connect the included interface cable to the GPIO connector, and snap the board onto a compatible 4, 8, or 16 I/O module mounting rack. They can use the rack’s power supply to power the Pi, and then use a Pi-supported programming language to read and write to up to 16 individually selectable digital input and/or output points. The mounting rack, power supply, and I/O modules will be sold separately.
A variety of input and output modules will be available and the single-channel design means that users need only buy the I/O required for their project. LEDs built into the input and output modules provide a visual indication of their status, while current-limiting built into the input channels avoids the need for current-limiting resistors. Electrical isolation separates field devices from the sensitive Pi electronics (up to 4kV).