At the launch event for the Raspberry Pi 3, Eben Upton revealed that there were plenty of industry customers for the Raspberry Pi, making up a significant percentage of those who have contributed to the eight million total of Raspberry Pis sold. Recently, Sfera Labs has launched a new line of Raspberry Pi add-on boards called Strato Pi designed for the professional applications these Pis are being used for.
The Strato Pi comes in two forms, the Base Board and the UPS. The Base Board has a long list of features so instead of editorialising them we're just going to list them out:
- 9-28Vdc power supply, with surge and reverse polarity protection
- real time clock with on-board lithium back-up battery
- standard RS-232 and RS-485 interfaces to the Raspberry Pi serial line, with opto-isolator and electrostatic discharge protection
- on-board buzzer, connected to an I/O pin of the Raspberry Pi board, for acoustic feedback
- on-board LEDs for power supply and serial line activity
- power supply and serial connections on a screw terminal block
Which is a lot of great stuff you don't usually get on the Pi. The UPS board also adds an integrated uninterruptible power supply, UPS status and controls and a hardware watchdog. The watchdog is fully integrated into the board and independent of the Pi.
There's also a pre-assembled server versions of the Strato Pis that come fully tested on Pi.
You can find out more information on the Strato Pi website. It's definitely worth a look for more high-end uses of the Raspberry Pi.
