Seeed Launches Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4-Powered ReTerminal All-in-One Edge AI, IoT Gadget
Designed for edge AI and Internet of Things workloads, this compact all-in-one includes a wealth of features.
Seeed Studio has announced the launch of an all-in-one carrier for the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4, packing a 5" capacitive touch display, cryptographic authentication hardware, accelerometer, a real-time clock, a light and proximity sensor, passive cooling, a high-speed expansion port and more into a compact unit: the reTerminal.
The reTerminal, Seeed explains of its latest creation, is a multi-function device powered by Raspberry Pi's latest Compute Module 4 system-on-module (SOM) — giving it four Arm Cortex-A72 processing cores running at 1.5GHz, a Broadcom VideoCore-VI graphics processor with hardware encode and decode, and a choice of 1GB, 2GB, 4GB, or 8GB LPDDR4 memory and up to 32GB of eMMC storage.
On top of this, Seeed has added a custom carrier board, which links the Compute Module 4 to a 5" 1280x720 capacitive touch display panel while also breaking out a single micro-HDMI with 4Kp60 support, a two-lane CSI camera interface, gigabit Ethernet on top of the option of 802.11b/g/n/ac Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 5/Bluetooth Low Energy built-in to the SOM, two USB 2.0 ports, and the usual Raspberry Pi 40-pin general-purpose input/output (GPIO) header.
It's the features not normally present on a Raspberry Pi that make the reTerminal interesting, though: In addition to the on-board touchscreen display, the reTerminal features a Levelek LS9800 digital light sensor with proximity detection, a Microchip MCP23008-E GPIO expander, Power over Ethernet (PoE) support, and a "Vertical Expansion Interface" at the rear of the chassis which gathers together one PCIe Gen. 2 lane, a USB 2.0 lane, and 28 GPIO pins.
On top of this Seeed has added an NXP PCF8563T real-time clock (RTC), an STMicroelectronics LIS3DHTR accelerometer, and a Microchip ATECC608A security coprocessor — the latter offering secure key storage, key agreement, signing, and verification in hardware for secure cryptographic authentication. The casing also doubles as a heatsink, with a fin array at the rear bleeding heat away from the SOM's system-on-chip, while four user-definable buttons can be found at the front.
The company has also announced a range of add-on modules, beginning with a microphone array and camera extension — both part of the company's desire to push the gadget for edge AI and other machine learning tasks. Additional network connectivity add-ons, including 4G LTE and 5G NR cellular, LoRa, and sub-GHz, have also been confirmed.
Seeed has listed the reTerminal now with pricing set at $195 for a model including a bundled Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 with 4GB of RAM and an on-board 32GB eMMC for storage, but pre-orders won't open until the end of the month; interested parties can pre-register to receive a $5 discount coupon by filling in this form.