Agreement opens door to customised Raspberry Pi

28th October 2015

Mick Elliott

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The potential of the Raspberry Pi computer has been opened up through an exclusive global deal between Farnell element14 and Raspberry Pi Trading. The companies will collaborate to offer design and manufacturing services to OEM customers to create bespoke designs based upon the Raspberry Pi technology platform.

The move follows customer demands to create customised versions of the Raspberry Pi boards.

element14 will use in house design expertise available through its Embest and AVID technology businesses, and it has access to over 200 design engineers to evaluate customers’ needs and provide bespoke Raspberry Pi-based customisation designs to meet their requirements. This is backed by comprehensive training provided by Broadcom and Raspberry Pi Trading

The agreement means the Raspberry Pi technology platform can be customised to suit specific customer applications across a wide range of industries and sectors from Internet of Things (IoT) technology to energy management, industrial and end consumer devices.

Ease of programming and the ability to interact with and control physical devices, opens the way for Raspberry Pi hardware to be designed in to applications on a commercial scale.

Customisations may include reconfiguring the board layout, incorporating additional functionality, redesigning the interfaces, and changing the board and memory configuration. As these will be bespoke designs it is envisaged that order quantities will start in the region of between 3,000 and 5,000 depending upon the nature of the customisation.

Claire Doyle, Global Head of Raspberry Pi at element14, said: “This exclusive partnership extends element14’s world class end-to-end design to manufacturing services to OEM customers, giving them the flexibility to customise any Raspberry Pi board in order to optimise it for a particular design.

“This is an incredibly exciting development for Raspberry Pi Trading, Broadcom and the industry as a whole, which will see boards featuring the Broadcom application processors being designed into end user applications and markets in significant volume.”

Eben Upton, CEO of Raspberry Pi Trading, commented: "We are delighted to announce the appointment of element14 as our global strategic partner for the design and manufacture of custom Raspberry Pi-derived hardware.”