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UP – Bridge the Gap is delighted to announce a broad range collaboration with Pi 2 Design. This collaboration will include the reselling of each other’s compatible products, cooperative marketing and sales, as well as custom designed add-ons for the Up-Board.

According to Fabrizio Del Maffeo, Manager Director of AAEON Europe (founders of the UP Board program): “Building on some of the best capabilities of existing maker and industrial boards in the market today, UP bridges the gap between the world of prototypes and the world of high-grade, mass-produced embedded systems solutions.  Thanks to the partnership with Pi 2 Design, UP users will gain easy access to a large portfolio of off-the-shelf, high quality industrial expansion boards and to the fast Prototype Design Services of Pi 2 Design.”

Michael Kelly, Founder and Chief Engineer for Pi 2 Design further expanded on the benefits of the partnership: “The Intel Cherry Trail Atom used on the UP Board brings low cost, high performance, power friendly x86 processing technology to the RPi Form Factor. With 4GB of DDR3L memory, Gigabit Ethernet, 4K Video decoding and more, the UP-Board is an outstanding platform for all kinds of industrial applications when supplemented with our professional I/O Shields.  Functionality such as 802.11n Wifi, mSATA SSD, High Power USB, CAN Bus, Ethercat, PoE and Grove IoT all combine to further enhance the outstanding capabilities of the UP Board.”

The current available add-ons include the 502SSD and the 503U3G.

The 502SSD interfaces one UP Board USB2.0 Host Port to a high capacity mSATA SSD Drive (up to 1TB), Dual USB 2.0 Host Ports with 2A Power and 802.11b/g/n WiFi w/Soft-AP Mode Support. A Battery Backed RTC and 1-Wire Temperature Sensor with 64-Bit Unique ID for asset tracking are also included.

The 503U3G interfaces one UP Board USB2.0 Host Port to a high speed 3G Modem, Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) and 802.11b/g/n WiFi with Soft-AP Mode Support.  It also connects the UP Board 2-wire UART with jumper selectable RS-232 or RS-485 buffer to a DB-9 for machine control.

From May 1 2016, both add-ons will be available from the Up-Shop (http://up-shop.org)
as well as the Pi 2 Design website (www.pi2design.com)