At blackdevice we’ve been designing and building hardware around the Raspberry Pi Compute Module for years. The ioX is our most capable board yet — and the result of everything we’ve learned along the way.

From the CM4 mini PC to the ioX: A hardware journey

The ioX didn’t appear out of nowhere. It’s the latest step in a line of carrier board development that started when we designed our first mini PC around the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 (it was also compatible with CM5 and other similar compute modules. That project taught us what a professional deployment actually demands from a carrier board and what the off-the-shelf options consistently fail to deliver.

Our next iteration, the Pi Hack, was already a significant leap forward: a more capable, more flexible carrier designed from the ground up for real-world use cases. We used it in client projects, pushed it hard, and took careful note of everything we wanted to improve.

The CM5 ioX is that improvement.

Built for industrial applications, just like the CM5 itself

Raspberry Pi designed the Compute Module 5 with industrial and commercial applications firmly in mind. The ioX is a carrier board built with exactly the same philosophy. Designed for demanding deployments where standard carrier boards fall short, and where features like PoE+ power delivery, remote management and flexible multimedia output aren’t optional extras, they’re requirements.

Every decision in the design of the ioX comes from direct experience deploying hardware in professional environments. We didn’t add features because they looked good on a spec sheet. We added them because we needed them.

Designed and assembled by our team

The ioX is not a reference design or a third-party board we’ve rebadged. It’s a product we designed entirely in-house, as a direct evolution of our own hardware development work, and one that we assemble ourselves on our SMT production line.

That means we have complete control over the design, we can support configuration variants, discuss customisation requirements, and iterate based on what our customers actually need. And it means the board has been built and tested to the same standard we apply to the hardware we produce for our own client projects. We didn’t design the ioX to sell — we designed it because we needed it. Making it available for external orders is a natural extension of that.

Available now for on-demand volume orders

The ioX is now available for on-demand volume orders. Whether you’re planning a pilot batch to validate a deployment or a larger production run for a client project, we’re ready to discuss your requirements, lead times and any configuration needs your application may have.

Full specifications and project details are available on the project page. If you’re evaluating carrier boards for a Raspberry Pi CM5 based project, get in touch — we’d love to hear what you’re building.