It also has the equally important connectivity requirements of modern industrial automation. From your classic terminal pins, serial connector, Ethernet, etc., there’s also access to the built-in Wi-Fi and Bluetooth of CM4, along with a GPS antenna add-on, and you can expand it with LoRa or LTE for more radio connections.

Ready to go

There’s no construction required for the device – unless you want to add LoRa, LTE, or an SSD module, but that’s exceptionally easy – and there’s even a little demo to help you get to grips with how the interface could work. It’s powered by a 12 V~36 V barrel jack which is a more old-school standard than USB-C, but does allow for a lot more taxing components to be attached to the various ports littered around the side.

Extra antennas are included to help increase range, which is always very handy. Fortunately, every port is also well labelled, so it is unlikely that you’ll accidentally plug an antenna into the wrong radio port.

The demo shows that the screen is sharp, colourful, and very responsive as well. It’s programmed in Node-RED, which may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but the whole system is built upon Raspberry Pi OS, so you can create an interface in any language that Raspberry Pi/Linux can support. So, all of them.

Biggest fan

It’s a very nice piece of kit and very flexible thanks to its wide array of connectivity and Raspberry Pi base. Unlike other similar devices, it does lack physical buttons as standard, so everything will have to be touchscreen unless some switches are added by the user. The fan is also very loud when it gets up to speed, which may not matter for some noisy industrial environments, but was very distracting in a quieter setting. Still, it’s a robust and very capable device. The acrylic plates are incredibly strong and everything else is very sturdily constructed too. You also could easily create a 3D-printed case for it, if the need arose.

Verdict

8/10

A great piece of kit at a good price that is stronger than it looks, although it does have its own minor quirks.

Price

£148/$180

Specs

SoC: Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 with 4GB RAM

Display: 7˝ IPS LCD, 1024 × 600, 5-point capacitive touch

Wireless connectivity: Wi-Fi, BLE 5.0, GPS, LoRa (with expansion), LTE (with expansion)

Wired connectivity: GPIO, Relay, DO, DI, CAN, RS485, ADC, RS232, USB-C, USB 2.0, Gigabit Ethernet, HDMI, 3.5 mm headphone jack, TF card, SIM card, CSI (for camera)