While the Raspberry Pi Foundation is the main face of the Raspberry Pi board, it only mainly promotes children’s education, and a subsidiary called Raspberry Pi Trading, funded in 2013, handles design, manufacturing and distribution of the Raspberry Pi boards, and puts profits back into the charity. Raspberry Pi Trading has now partnered with Element14 to offer customization services for the Raspberry Pi board.
That means you’ll be able to remove or add interfaces and headers, replace the micro SD by a more reliable eMMC flash, add new functionalities to the board, and even re-design the layout in order to better match your project’s requirements. The companies “expect order quantities to start in the region of between 3,000 and 5,000 depending upon the nature of the customization”, so the service does not seem to be available , or cost effective, for smaller orders for a few hundred units.
Element14 has access to over 200 engineers via companies such as Embest and AVID technology in order to provide these customization services. You can find more on Element14’s CustomPi page.
Via LinuxGizmos

Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
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