I’d like to use the WD boards with our products, but the requirement to press the power switch to turn the device on is a show stopper for us. We currently use the PI3 which boots as soon as power is available. This is a requirement for our product that it boot as soon as power is turned on. Is there any bypass method or feature which will allow the WD boards to power on without requiring a manual press of the power switch?
Hi, thanks for considering our CM platform for your product! We have two new CM platforms on the way that might fit your application. These boards have an on/off slider switch on the power input. We plan to launch these as part of kits over the next 1-2 months.
The first is the PiDrive Node CM Adapter kit. It’s similar to our PiDrive Node Zero product- it mounts the Pi to the back of the HDD in a compact envelope and presents the IO ports in one orientation. It has support to solder in the standard 40-pin GPIO header, a camera port, power on/off slider and another slider switch to put the board in USB device mode for CM programming. It also has a microSD receptacle to support CM3 Lite. We’re planning to launch this as an adapter kit without CM and without PiDrive so users that already have these can redeploy them.
The second new board is essentially a follow-on to our CM-to-SATA adapter. But we plan to launch it as part of a computer kit (similar to our PiDrive Compute Centre). It’s called PiDrive Thin Compute. The device enclosure has a small and thin footprint with the CM adapter board and a 120GB SATA SSD inside. Our original CM-to-SATA adapter board has been modified to add a 3rd USB port inside the enclosure for the WiFi dongle, an RTC, an SDcard receptacle for CM3 Lite support, slider on/off power switch and access to some GPIO’s in the PCB artwork.
I’ll try to post some pictures of these on this thread in the next several days.
Though these are planned for general launch as part of kits, we can support special applications.
If you prefer to contact me off-line regarding the specifics of your application, my email is dave.chew@wdc.com.
Thanks.
Thanks for the quick reply. I look forward to seeing the pictures and specs on the new kits.
Dave,
Any updates on the release of these products? I’m trying to prototype a commercial product using Pi CM but need to be able to attach a hat to the whole design.
I emailed you last week but got no reply. Will you be offering bulk quantity discounts on these?
Nick
