[Updated 2026/07/28] We are glad to present our latest development, that comes to replace our previous laboratory equipment: IndiPI! A development board created specifically for teaching Industrial Information Technology and physical computing. In short, it is a Raspberry PI 5... and much more! And we have updated and published everything you need to create your own kit.
Up until now, we have been working with NI myRIO and LabVIEW. We have squeeze it much and, after some extra work, we were able to program it using Python. We have learned much with it, but now we feel it is time for change and we have developed a sort of substitute for that kit.
With the collaboration of all of the teachers of the Industrial IT course, the great hands of our technician, Imanol Bardaji, and with the starring work of Kauldi Odriozola in his Final Degree Project, we have created a novel approach to using a Raspberry Pi for learning purposes.
And we have named it IndiPi. From Industrial IT and Raspberry PI. Yeah, we know, it is not the greatest of the names, but it's alright.
We have creted a PCB design with its metacrilate shield to place firmly a Raspberry PI 5 official case with a Raspberry PI inside (well, that should be obvious). This way, it is much more rugged for the often too strong hands of our students.
Our first version was a bare PCB, similar to a breadboard, and we had wires under it connecting each pin. Of course, that was for the first prototype, but then we evolved to a handmade PCB with the toner-transfer method. Then, our technician Imanol soldered each and every pin. This way, we got our first official kit set.
After a somewhat fail (Rev2) where we had an approximation to the original design, but in a simpler way (using KiCad as a tool), we registered the project (OSHWA ES000053), so we could show the world what we were trying to do, and finally in 2026 we created Rev3, the full succesful KiCad version of the original handmade design.
The GPIO pins are connected to the main board using a flat ribbon cable. From there we have created the connections and sockets for using myRIO's MXP boards and Digilent's PMOD devices. We have let some extra connections in a terminal board.
In the space between, we have added an Analog to Digital converter, so we can play with the analogic sensors we already had on our MXP boards. This way, everything is ready for creating enticing physical computing projects reusing the devices we already had. Genius!
For the communication and the daily work, we have chosen a USB-to-Ethernet adapter, we have adapted our PCs to connect the Raspberry PIs to the Internet (through ICS) and everything works smoothly. This way, we can use Visual Studio Code over SSH and TigerVNC over VNC.
And in the software hand, the Raspberry OS let us create exciting applications using any standard language. We have chosen Python as our main language, but we could use JavaScript too, as we did in some of our examples. Everything is designed for the students to have a great active learning experience.
All the documents, code and guides are publicly available at our Github site:
https://github.com/AitzolEzeizaEHU/IndiPI