Businesses can now design and buy officially customised versions of Raspberry Pi boards, so that they can tailor the micro computers to suit their needs.
Tech distributor and systems design specialist element 14 has signed an exclusive deal with Raspberry Pi to offer customers bespoke designs of its super-popular Raspberry Pi boards -- which element 14 already manufactures.
According to element 14, these customisation options could include all kinds of tweaks, like reconfiguring the board's layout, adding more functionality, refreshing the interface and changing the board's memory configuration.
The company's new Raspberry Pi Customisation Service promises to guide businesses through every step of the process from initial concept of how the boards will work, through to actually getting them manufactured and delivered.
Element 14 guesses that, initially, most customisation options will be for 3000 to 5000 boards -- depending on how many changes they require to the current Raspberry Pi system. And the kinds of businesses that might be interested are pretty endless, from telecommunications companies to Internet of Things (IoT) startups to energy management companies and end consumer devices.
Claire Doyle, element 14's Global Head of Raspberry Pi, said in a statement: "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."
Last year, Raspberry Pi launched its Compute Module, aimed specifically at business and industrial users, providing them with more flexibility in how they take advantage of the processor. The new agreement with element 14 means this thinking has been taken up a notch, providing those that want more and more customisation options with more freedom than ever before to really make Raspberry Pi their own.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
