🖥️ ElephantPi 4B¶

In Stock Single Board Computer

Industrial brains in a compact box. The ElephantPi 4B is built around the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4, housed in a rugged aluminium carrier board with dual Gigabit Ethernet, M.2 NVMe, wide-voltage DC input, and isolated RS485/RS232 — ready for real-world industrial deployment.

Quick Start¶

⚡ Running Linux in 10 minutes

1. Flash the ElephantPi OS image to an M.2 SSD or eMMC 2. Insert SSD / CM4 module into the carrier board 3. Connect 9–36V DC power 4. SSH in or connect HDMI + USB keyboard

Technical Specifications¶

Compute Module (CM4)
CPU	Broadcom BCM2711 Quad-core Cortex-A72 @ 1.8 GHz
RAM Options	2 GB / 4 GB / 8 GB LPDDR4X
eMMC Options	0 GB (Lite) / 8 GB / 16 GB / 32 GB
Carrier Board I/O
Ethernet	2 × Gigabit (one isolated for fieldbus)
USB	2 × USB-A 3.0, 1 × USB-C OTG
Serial	1 × RS485 (isolated), 1 × RS232
Storage	1 × M.2 2280 NVMe (PCIe Gen 2)
Display	1 × HDMI 2.0 (4K@30fps)
GPIO	40-pin HAT-compatible header
Power
Input Voltage	9–36V DC (terminal block)
Power Consumption	5–12W typical
Physical
Dimensions	130 × 90 × 40 mm
Mounting	DIN rail clip or 4× M3 standoffs
Operating Temperature	-20°C to +60°C
Protection	IP20

OS Setup¶

Download the image¶

# ElephantPi OS (Debian 12 Bookworm based)
https://downloads.elephantronics.com/elephantpi/os/latest.img.xz

# Verify checksum
sha256sum latest.img.xz

Flash to M.2 SSD¶

Use Raspberry Pi Imager or dd:

# Using dd (Linux/macOS)
xz -d latest.img.xz
sudo dd if=latest.img of=/dev/sdX bs=4M status=progress

Headless SSH

Create an empty file called ssh in the /boot partition after flashing to enable SSH on first boot.

First boot¶

Default credentials:

Username: elephant
Password: elephant123

Serial Ports¶

RS485 (isolated)¶

The RS485 port is isolated from the main board — safe for connecting to PLCs and industrial sensors without ground loops.

# Device node
/dev/ttyRS485   # or /dev/ttyAMA2 depending on OS version

# Test with minicom
sudo apt install minicom
minicom -D /dev/ttyRS485 -b 9600

Python example — read Modbus register from PLC:

from pymodbus.client import ModbusSerialClient

client = ModbusSerialClient(
    port='/dev/ttyRS485',
    baudrate=9600,
    parity='N',
    stopbits=1,
    bytesize=8
)
client.connect()
result = client.read_holding_registers(address=0, count=4, slave=1)
print(result.registers)

GPIO¶

The 40-pin GPIO header is fully compatible with Raspberry Pi HATs. Use gpiozero or RPi.GPIO:

from gpiozero import LED, Button

led = LED(17)
btn = Button(27)

btn.when_pressed = led.on
btn.when_released = led.off

Watchdog¶

Enable the hardware watchdog for reliable unattended operation:

# Enable on boot
echo 'dtparam=watchdog=on' | sudo tee -a /boot/config.txt
sudo reboot

# Configure watchdog daemon
sudo apt install watchdog
sudo systemctl enable watchdog