Paisley Microsystems Unveils the Firefly Raspberry Pi CM5 Industrial Automation Carrier Family
Feature-packed boards, with schematics and mechanical design files to be released under an open source license, crowdfunding soon.
North Caroline-based Paisley Microsystems is preparing to launch a crowdfunding campaign for the Firefly Automation Controller family: carrier boards for the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 and Compute Module 5 built with industrial-grade projects in mind.
"The Firefly Automation Controller family of boards merge the Raspberry Pi Compute Module-compatible modules with a built-in [STMicroelectronics] STM32H7 microcontroller, creating a fast, robust, and highly flexible platform for industrial control," claim company co-founders Matthew Guo and Emiliano García-López. "In addition to highly configurable high-speed interfaces and I/O [Input/Output] buffering, Firefly boards feature two IO-Link Class B channels to control thousands of sensor and actuator modules, which can be powered by an auxiliary 24V power input, optionally with a fully isolated IO-Link subsystem supply."
As the pair explain, the Firefly boards are designed to take a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 or Compute Module 5 system-on-module, or OV Tech's pin-compatible Pi.MX8 module. The modular system includes an on-board STMicro STM32H7 microcontroller running at up to 480MHz for real-time workloads and two IO-Link Class B channels — with optional modules adding isolated inputs and outputs, additional IO-Link capabilities, powerline monitoring, stepper and servo motor control, and more.
The top-end Firefly-5, meanwhile, adds dual gigabit Ethernet connectivity, optional Fast Ethernet networking for the microcontroller, and up-rated power capacity of up to 200W from USB Power Delivery or 600W for peripherals, while packing the up-to-480MHz STM32H723. For those who don't need quite that much power, the Firefly-5lite will be offered as a lower-cost option, dropping to 100W over USB and swapping the second gigabit Ethernet port for a Fast Ethernet alternative, while shifting to the slower 100MHz STM32F410.
Both models include two 40-pin general-purpose input/output (GPIO) headers, one wired to the host Compute Module and the other to the STM32H7, two USB Type-C ports configurable as programming, device, or host interfaces, and one each of M.2 B-key and M-key expansion slots for cellular modems, Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) storage, and more.
The company has also pledged to make the design of both boards available under an as-yet unspecified open-source license — to include a GitHub repository with schematics, mechanical CAD files, and software examples. While this had not yet been published at the time of writing, schematics and mechanical drafts for the company's earlier Firefly-4 design are available on the Paisley Microsystems downloads page.
The company is planning to launch a crowdfunding campaign for the Firefly family on Crowd Supply soon, with interested parties advised to sign up on the campaign page to be notified when it goes live; pricing had not yet been disclosed at the time of writing, but additional information can be found on the Paisley Microsystems website.
