Soon, there could be Pi in just about any device that needs embedded computing power. The Raspberry Pi Foundation has announced a new version of the Raspberry Pi platform that is aimed at a whole new class of devices and applications. Called the Raspberry Pi Compute Module, the new product puts all of the Pi’s core functionality onto a small board the size of a laptop memory module, allowing it to be plugged in to custom-built hardware.

Intended for use with custom-built circuit boards, the Compute Module puts the Raspberry Pi’s system-on-a-chip with 512MB of memory and 4GB of Flash storage on a board that fits into a standard DDR2 SODIMM slot. To help hardware developers get started, the foundation is also releasing an “IO board” for the module that has the same sort of input and output interfaces as the single-board Pi—the main difference being that the board is entirely open source.

The Raspberry Pi itself is not open source hardware, because it relies on a Broadcom ARM processor (the BCM2835) for its computing, graphics processing, and memory. But Broadcom did recently publish an open source version of its graphics driver code (under BSD license) and has provided more documentation of the system-on-a-chip’s internals for developers.

By providing an open source design for the input, output, and power supply components of the Raspberry Pi, the foundation hopes to take the diminutive computer beyond “builder” projects and into actual industrial and embedded applications that drive up demand for Raspberry Pi hardware, helping the foundation to raise more money to support the open source projects and educational initiatives it funds.