Industrial applications – going postal in Portugal

If you’re in certain bits of Portugal this Christmas and your presents arrive in the post on time, you’ve got a Raspberry Pi to thank. We’re aware of dozens of big industrial applications of the Raspberry Pi, but generally the companies using them prefer us not to publicise what they’re doing, so they can continue to steal a march on their competitors. So I was really pleased to receive an email from Daniel Ramos at a Portuguese R&D company called Wolfd.com, with some photos of a really big industrial application that they’ve successfully deployed which we are allowed to talk about. When I say “really big”, I mean it. It’s really, really big. It’s the sorting mechanism for CTT, the Portuguese Post Office. (And we get to discuss it here because, as a monopoly, they don’t have to worry about competitors doing the same thing.) Daniel says that they’ve been working with the Pi for over a year now, and says that given that it was designed for education, its robustness has surprised them. CTT needed some help because the old LCD displays on the sorting machines, which need to be read by humans, were fast becoming unusable with age, as you can see here: Some of this stuff is neither human-readable nor machine-readable: a real problem when you’ve got hand-sorting going on. Broken LCD panels aren’t the only problem – the old displays were hard to read in the position they were mounted in, and suffered from very low contrast. So, in a first wave of replacements, a bank of 24 of these antiquated machines has been refitted with Raspberry Pis and TFT flat panels. If you’ve ever wanted to watch 24 Pis booting in a row, now’s your chance: This is a low-power option as well as being much more user-friendly; there’s no need to keep hard drives spinning at each station. The Pis sit behind each screen and are powered by its internal power supply, and are connected through an Ethernet network to a server that provides them with the information they need to display. The software is all written in Python and Pygame. So if your family and friends in Portugal notice an up-tick in postal reliability, you know who to thank. Thanks so much for showing us what you’ve been doing, Daniel. I’ll refrain from asking you to keep us posted.

URL: http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/5506?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=industrial-applications-going-postal-in-portugal