We’re currently looking for an Industrial Pi solution with DIN RAIL case. We know about the RevPi (which is supported by Balena), but it has too many features that we don’t use and thus too expensive.
So we’ve stumbled upon the UniPi Neuron S103 and the Ioni Pi. Both have a standard Raspberry Pi 4 inside them, so BalenaOS could run just fine on them probably. Only thing is that the UniPi uses its own controller to manage the inputs and outputs instead of the GPIO’s of the RPI. The Ioni Pi (as far as I can see) just uses the GPIO’s to manage the inputs and outputs.
So my question is if anyone has tried the UniPi with BalenaOS and can tell me their story if it worked or not. And if so, did it work out of the box?
And any other suggestions for these kind of Pi’s are welcome! We just need I/O, DIN RAIL and power the Pi via 24Vdc.
Bart, I am checking with the team to see if anyone has any advice or recommendations for you, but let’s see if anyone from the community weighs in with any advice as well.
I suspect you already know this, but of course we build the balenaFin to meet this purpose as well!
Alternatively, if those boards you’ve mentioned are “close enough” to a Pi, it may be an easy lift to support them yourself by simply building a customer balenaOS that essentially imports their device tree, as outlined here: https://www.balena.io/os/docs/custom-build/
Hey @bversluijs, additionally, let me also mention that balena device support team could build a custom version of balenaOS specifically for your device type (UniPi in this case), making sure to meet all of your hardware requirements.
Please see this page for pricing information:
Feel free to reach out to solutions@balena.io to have a longer chat about this option.
Thanks for your response! I’m curious what you find out!
I’m familiar with the balenaFin and it’s a great board, however, it doesn’t meet our purpose here unfortunately.
We don’t want to create (and maintain) our own custom build, because of extra complications (and thus time).
I’ve been looking into running BalenaOS on a UniPi Neuron M103 but went for RevPi when I learned that the steps to set up vanilla Raspbian for use with a UniPi were very outdated. It is probably not that hard to resolve I just didn’t have the time to wait for it.
RevPi Core 3+ worked out of the box.
I am also looking forward to hear if anyone has had success with BalenaOS on Unipis.
Have you checked out balenaFin - it’s balena’s very own industrial alternative to Raspberry Pi based on the CM3. Is there any particular feature that you are looking for in the UniPi?
I’ve tested the Fin at my daytime job. It’s a great device but it requires too much work for this side project.
I need 12/24V outputs or relay outputs in professional quality without need for custom pcb development. Preferably also relay outputs, inputs and analog IO. UniPi was interesting due to very affordable customization/branding options at small scale.
Both Unipi and RevPi are a bit of an overkill for what I actually need but they come fully assembled, tested, and ready to mount on a DIN rail which significantly reduces the required development resources at a slightly higher cost pr. device.
We received the IonoPi and I’ve found some time to work with it.
Because it’s just a Raspberry Pi inside it (in our case, the RPI 4), BalenaOS worked just fine as expected. But we were more curious about the GPIO and other peripherals.
I can confirm the GPIO’s just work out of the box. They have a kernel module available, but it just preconfigures some things as far as I know.
There is RTC support in Balena, which is nice. The IonoPi’s RTC also works with Balena, only thing you’ve to do is add this environment variable: