· Industrial Hardware · 2 min read
Raspberry Pi in Industry: Toy or Engineering Tool?
Using a standard RPi 4 with a generic SD card in a factory is suicide. Guide to using Compute Modules (CM5/CM4), OverlayFS, and industrial-grade hardware.
There is a giant prejudice in the industry: “The Raspberry Pi is an educational toy, it’s not fit for 24/7.”
If you grab a standard Raspberry Pi 4 B, put a $5 USD SD card in it, and throw it into an electrical cabinet at 50°C… they are right. It will fail.
But if you use the right hardware and configure the OS like an engineer, the RPi ecosystem is the most flexible and cost-effective IIoT platform in existence. Here is how I do it for my clients.
1. The Hardware: Forget the “Model B”
The classic green board everyone knows has fatal flaws for industry: fragile micro-HDMI connectors, SD card exposed to vibrations, and poor thermal management.
The Solution: Compute Modules (CM4 / CM5)
Compute modules eliminate unnecessary connectors and expose the PCIe bus and GPIOs in a robust form factor.
Use them mounted on industrial “Carrier Boards” such as:
- Revolution Pi (RevPi): DIN PLC format, native 24V, isolated digital inputs.
- OnLogic: Fanless metal enclosures.
- Seeed Studio: CM4 with massive heatsinks.
2. The Achilles Heel: The SD Card
90% of RPi failures in industry are corrupted SD cards due to power cuts.
Mitigation Strategy
- Industrial eMMC: Buy CM4/CM5 with soldered eMMC memory. They are orders of magnitude more reliable than an SD.
- Overlay File System (Read-Only Root): Configure Linux to mount the root partition as “Read-Only”. All temporary changes are written to RAM. If power is cut, there is no half-written data on disk.
- In Raspberry Pi OS:
raspi-config-> Performance Options -> Overlay File System.
- In Raspberry Pi OS:
3. Power and Watchdogs
A 5V phone charger won’t cut it. You need:
- High-quality 24V to 5V DIN rail power supply (Mean Well).
- Hardware Watchdog: Enable the BCM processor watchdog. If the kernel hangs, hardware reboots the board automatically.
- Edit
/etc/watchdog.conf.
- Edit
4. What is it GOOD for?
Don’t use an RPi for high-speed motion control (that’s what the PLC is for). Use it for what the PLC is bad at:
- MQTT / Sparkplug B Gateway.
- Low-cost Wireguard VPN Server.
- Docker Containers with Node-RED for IT/OT business logic.
- Local Dashboards (Grafana/Kiosk mode).
Conclusion
The Raspberry Pi is a formidable engineering tool if you respect its limits and cover its weaknesses. With a CM5, eMMC, and OverlayFS, you have an industrial PC for a fraction of the cost of a traditional IPC.
