Hobbyist Raspberry Pi boards keep creeping into factory floors and machine cabinets, and Waveshare has a new kit aimed squarely at that crossover audience. The Isolated RS232 / RS485 / CAN / CAN FD Expansion Board ships as a complete enclosure kit that drops a Raspberry Pi 4B or Raspberry Pi 5 into a DIN rail or wall-mountable plastic case, wires up a stack of isolated industrial serial buses, and accepts a 7-36V DC supply through screw terminals.

The interface lineup is the main draw. The board exposes two RS485 channels (300 bps to 921600 bps) driven by an SC16IS752 UART bridge with SP485 transceivers, a single RS232 port via an SP3232EEN, a CAN FD channel handled by an MCP2518FD and MCP2562FD pairing that scales from 5 kbps up to 8 Mbps, and a classic CAN Bus port using the familiar MCP2515 and SN65HVD230 combination at up to 1 Mbps. All of them are galvanically isolated, which is the part that matters when you are tying a Linux SBC into a noisy machine network. Communication with the Pi happens over SPI and UART through the 40-pin GPIO header.

Despite the industrial packaging, the kit leaves the Pi's headline I/O intact. You still get gigabit Ethernet, the four USB ports, and a full-size HDMI output via an included adapter. Raspberry Pi 5 owners can also keep the PCIe lane in play for NVMe SSDs, a second GbE port, or 4G/5G modems, and there is partial HAT+ compatibility through a pass-through header, though Waveshare notes that height and SPI/UART contention will rule some HATs out. The assembled unit measures 154.6 x 83.7 x 59 mm (6.1 x 3.3 x 2.3 inches) and weighs 323 grams (11.4 ounces) without the Pi.

On the software side there are no surprises, which is the point. The board works with Mike McCauley's BCM2835 C library, wiringPi, and standard Python packages for CAN and serial work, and Waveshare publishes schematics, sample code, and setup notes on the product wiki. That makes the kit an easy fit for anyone already running Raspberry Pi OS, Debian, or Ubuntu on the Pi for SCADA gateways, PLC bridges, or vehicle telemetry projects.

Waveshare lists the kit at $54.99 (€50) on its own store, with the Raspberry Pi sold separately.