OnLogic Factor 201 Fits The Raspberry Pi CM4 For Industrial Needs & Other Innovative Uses
Back in March the folks at OnLogic announced the Factor 201 as a Raspberry Pi CM4 (Compute Module 4) fitted for industrial use-cases like IoT gateways and more. The past few weeks I have been testing out this Raspberry Pi powered device and indeed it opens the door for using the Raspberry Pi within more harsh and demanding environments.
The OnLogic Factor 201 combines the Raspberry Pi CM4 with OnLogic's custom carrier board and a passive cooling solution built around an industrial-grade chassis. The Factor 201 is billed as an "Industrial IoT Gateway" but can serve a variety of purposes where needing a passively-cooled, heavy duty enclosure with Raspberry Pi class power consumption and performance.
The Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 is designed for embedded use-cases and features a quad-core Cortex-A72 processor, dual display outputs, and comes in up to 32 variants depending upon desired amounts of LPDDR4 system memory, WiFi networking or not, and varying eMMC flash memory capacities. The Raspberry Pi CM4 uses the same Broadcom BCM2711 SoC as the Raspberry Pi 4 albeit in a different form factor. The Raspberry Pi CM4 and in turn the OnLogic Factor 201 can be fitted from 1GB to 8GB of LPDDR4-3200 SDRAM, up to 32GB of eMMC flash memory, and optional 802.11 b/g/n/ac WiFi wireless.
Besides the eMMC storage, the Factor 201 with its carrier board can also allow fitting an M.2 SATA drive for up to 2TB of additional storage. The Factor 201 does wire up one HDMI output if wanting to use this as a general purpose, industrial-grade computer but otherwise is designed for IoT deployments, industrial controllers, edge gateways, and other platforms where needing a rugged, low-power Arm Linux system.
The Factor 201 has an operating temperature range from -20 to 60 degree Celsius, wide input power range (12V - 24V DC via 3-pin terminal block), and is built to last. Further opening it to innovative uses is support for Power over Ethernet (PoE).
The OnLogic custom carrier board for the Factor 201 allows for dual 1GbE Ethernet ports, one RS-232/422/485 terminal block connector, one USB 3.2 Gen1 port, two USB 2.0 ports, one HDMI output, and one USB-C management port.
In addition to the Factor 201 chassis designed to help with heat dissipation and allowing the Raspberry Pi CM4 to withstand tough environments, the chassis does allow mounting against a DIN rail and wall mounting depending upon your needs. Long story short, the Factor 201 is more than just a fancy case for the Raspberry Pi CM4.