Raspberry Pi for the control cabinet

The performance of this DIN rail PC is scalable on demand, using standardized SODIMM processor modules. This also allows future performance upgrades and ensures extended long-term system availability.

Thanks to its low installation height of 62.2mm, compact width of 6TE (108 mm) and interfaces at the top and bottom, this Raspberry Pi computer fits into any control cabinet - including small flush-mounted distribution boxes in building automation, for which DIN 43880 allows maximum installation depths of up to 70mm.

"With our application-ready Smart Manager 4.0, OEMs and system integrators benefit from an industry-grade Raspberry Pi DIN rail PC with a highly tailored Linux OS, for which we also offer comprehensive software and integration support, continuously updated security patches and long-term availability of at least ten years. This makes our industry-compatible open source solutions extremely attractive for many building automation and industrial control tasks," explained Markus Hühn, Managing Director of STV Electronic.

STV Electronic has already found first users for the new Raspberry Pi DIN rail PC in the energy management sector, for which the company also offers a wide range of M-Bus level converters. Further applications can be found in connection with many other I/O and fieldbus based solutions in industrial control cabinets, for which a Raspberry Pi system offers the ideal open source based edge logic.

The growing demand for Industry 4.0 and IIoT connectivity and edge logic, in particular, is driving the trend away from proprietary controllers towards open Linux platforms such as Raspberry Pi. In the Debian Embedded Linux development environment of the Smart Manager 4.0 DIN rail PC, users have a free choice between real-time programming environments like CoDeSys, IoT development tools like NodeRed, web server technologies like Node.js, or even 'classic' C and C++ code, and many other solutions from the huge Raspberry Pi community. Building and home automation solutions such as FHEM or openHAB as well as Mosquitto for MQTT based real-time communication are also supported.

In the currently available multithreaded quad-core design, the Raspberry Pi based DIN rail PC is equipped with a 1.2GHz Broadcom BCM2837B0 processor and 1GB LPDDR2 SDRAM. For the on-board flash memory, users can choose between 8, 16 or 32GB eMMC. For even larger memory requirements, there is an SD slot version.

In terms of communication interfaces, the new Smart Manager 4.0 from STV Electronic offers up to two Ethernet, six USB 2.0 and two galvanic isolated specifiable serial RS485 interfaces, one of which can also be designed as RS232.

In addition, it provides a PCIe extension bus, which can be used to connect customer-specific extensions such as WLAN, field buses such as M-Bus, Modbus or LonWorks, as well as other external I/Os. One HDMI is also supported for local visualization functions. With a voltage input from 12 V to 30 V, a temperature range from -40 to +55°C, and at least 24 hours battery-buffered real-time clock, the DIN rail PC can be integrated into a wide variety of application scenarios.

The new Raspberry Pi based Smart Manager 4.0 from STV Electronic is available now. Housings with customer-specific labeling, embedded variants and individual I/O versions are available on request.

STV Electronic also supports OEM customers, system integrators and large end users in the design of specific control logic if required.