Raspberry Pi - industrial enclosure

For anyone considering using a Raspberry Pi in a more industrial environment, Phoenix now make a DIN rail mounting case. I received a link by email yesterday and thought other users may be interested:

https://blog.phoenixcontact.com/marketing-gb/raspberry-pi-gets-a-new-home/

I should say that I have no connection with Phoenix and haven't tried the product but it does look interesting.

Nick

Be wary of the older Raspberry Pi's, only use the latest versions.

The camera modules always break or at least stop working and cables come loose regularly and require a restart.

Purchase good quality SD cards and ensure to setup the OS so it never needs to write to the SD card; I setup a ram drive to store any logs and temp data.

Solder the power connection onto the board; avoid using USB power.

Ensure you supply enough current or the system can hang or the Ethernet adapter can stop working.

Codeblue said:

Be wary of the older Raspberry Pi's, only use the latest versions.

The camera modules always break or at least stop working and cables come loose regularly and require a restart.

Purchase good quality SD cards and ensure to setup the OS so it never needs to write to the SD card; I setup a ram drive to store any logs and temp data.

Solder the power connection onto the board; avoid using USB power.

Ensure you supply enough current or the system can hang or the Ethernet adapter can stop working.

Click to expand...

For the reasons above that's why I can never understand anybody using one for a real world permanent industrial application, I use one for Kodi but that's where it ends for me......

I also have Pi-2 running Kodi, I have a PI-2 running as a print server supporting Airprint for a printer that doesn't, I have a Pi-3 that I'm experimenting with as a desktop replacement and I have an original PI model B running as a security camera.

I have demo'd the Codesys control for Pi in the office and it is a great learning/development tool but I haven't used one for a real project. But for Home automation... It would be better suited.

Nick

P.S. I tend to use a genuine apple iPad (not iPhone) charger as power supply 2A at 5V

My two cents.
Using a Raspberry Pi in an industrial automation application is short sighted. When you use a common PLC (MicroLogix, Siemens S-7, ect…) you are using something that follows a common standard that will be understood by others that interface with the application in the future. For example, if you have a control panel that is ten years old and has a MicroLogix 1000 in it, it may be a bit of a pain but you have a lot of resources if you need to trouble shoot a problem and worst case you can replace the PLC with another 1000 or you can easily upgrade to say a MicroLogix 1400. If you create a custom application with something like the Raspberry Pi the person responsible for maintaining the system ten years from now is going to want to blow your head off when the system goes down because he/she probably will have never seen a Raspberry Pi used as an automation controller. In other words, when you use a commonly used PLC you don’t have to re-invent the application if it fails where you are more than likely going to have to if the application uses a non-standard device.

I do not agree with firejo at all, a factory PLC will be out of service after 10 years, and nobody has spareparts, and if then expensive ones.
As raspberry and arduino are so cheap i send 2 units to a project, and the raspberry is capable of codesys so standard 61131. an arduino is standard C and also very easy to program, (and a lot faster as any PLC is.
(even better what processor is in a micrologix?)

I see where Firejo is coming from. A lot of times I see people complaining about prices of hardware on this forum. For a lot of industrial application, the hardware price is a rounding error compared to down time. I have walked into plants that I never been before and get Rockwell stuff running with no documentation beside what the operators are able to tell me. I just don't see that with audino or Pi. this is not even bringing up the environmental factor.

What kind of fly by night PLC manufacturer are you using that would only be available for 10 years, shooter?

Edit:
The way I see it, it's like a CNC manufacturer using something like a Fanuc or Siemens controller vs some proprietary "roll their own" type controller.

By using something existing and well known you have yourself an existing network of spare parts, knowledge, and service that you would otherwise lack from a system created by yourself.

What ever cost benefit you gain during parts purchase would surely be lost over the life time of maintenance.

shooter said:

I do not agree with firejo at all, a factory PLC will be out of service after 10 years, and nobody has spareparts, and if then expensive ones.
As raspberry and arduino are so cheap i send 2 units to a project, and the raspberry is capable of codesys so standard 61131. an arduino is standard C and also very easy to program, (and a lot faster as any PLC is.
(even better what processor is in a micrologix?)

Click to expand...

In 1991 the first SLC processor was released. In 1994 the first MicroLogix was released. In 1997 the first Logix processor was released. The Raspberry PI was designed to be a hobbyist product and is predominately used as such. There aren’t college courses focused on using the Raspberry PI in Industrial Automation applications, there isn’t volumes of documents on using the Raspberry PI in the Industrial Automation world and there aren’t multibillion dollar companies focused on using Raspberry PI’s in the Industrial Automation world. If you build two control panels today, one with a CompactLogix and the other with a Raspberry PI as the core processor and in ten years both need repairs, I guarantee you that you won’t have any trouble at all finding someone who can come in and deal with the Logix based panel but would be very hard pressed to find someone who could even understand the Raspberry PI panel let alone deal with it.

shooter said:

I do not agree with firejo at all, a factory PLC will be out of service after 10 years, and nobody has spareparts, and if then expensive ones.

Click to expand...

Ummm, no. PLCs typically have a 20-year life cycle. There are tons of PLCs that have been around for the past 10 years or more. CompactLogix has been around at least that long, as has the I/O, and there are no signs of that slowing down. Replacement parts are easy to find.

shooter said:

As raspberry and arduino are so cheap i send 2 units to a project, and the raspberry is capable of codesys so standard 61131. an arduino is standard C and also very easy to program, (and a lot faster as any PLC is.
(even better what processor is in a micrologix?)

Click to expand...

Easy to program, for you, but hard to troubleshoot for the maintenance technician who is used to ladder logic. Are you personally going to go troubleshoot every machine you deploy whenever they have issues for the rest of their production cycles, day or night, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, rain or shine, no matter where they are? I doubt it.

Time and time again I see you microcontroller guys make these grand statements, but you just don't get it. If you make something hard to troubleshoot, it costs your customer money. Even if you are a robot who can clone himself and doesn't require sleep, that extra time it takes you to get to the job site to even start looking at the problem potentially cost your customer tens of thousands of dollars in downtime.

Only foolish people consider the sticker price of a piece of hardware as the only basis for decision-making. The hardware sticker price is not the total cost of ownership. If a customer of mine found out that I could have saved them tens of thousands of dollars of downtime by spending a few extra hundred on a PLC that their maintenance technicians could troubleshoot, they'd never do business with me again. That "cheap" Raspberry Pi cost them more than a full Control Logix Rack in the end!

And we haven't even talked about hardware environmental ratings.

Sure, the Raspberry PI is faster. But in the industrial environment, processor speed takes a backseat to reliability. If my entire program scans every 2 milliseconds, what good does a faster processor do me? None. I don't need a faster processor. I need a RELIABLE processor. The picture here is bigger than clock speeds and cores.

The simple fact of the matter is that Arduinos and Raspberry Pis have no place in the industrial automation environment. They're not rugged enough, they're not user-friendly enough, and who's to say they won't be obsolete and difficult to get in 10 years? What if the MicroSD card that holds everything goes bad and they don't make MicroSD cards anymore? I find it puzzling you're worried about obsolesence in the Automation world and offer up an IT world solution where parts and systems go obsolete orders of magnitude faster than industrial automation systems.

Firejo said:

In 1991 the first SLC processor was released.

Click to expand...

And 25 years later, Rockwell is just STARTING to phase the product out. I think spare parts are still available for everything, and many items can be purchased new.

I have my doubts that you'll be able to get an identical model PI in 25 years, unless you buy a bunch of spares ahead of time, and hope they don't go bad on the shelf.

mk42 said:

And 25 years later, Rockwell is just STARTING to phase the product out. I think spare parts are still available for everything, and many items can be purchased new.

I have my doubts that you'll be able to get a n identical model PI in 25 years, unless you buy a bunch of spares ahead of time, and hope they don't go bad on the shelf.

Click to expand...

Not to mention the sheer mountains of used SLC parts that can be easily found all over the web. I work for a systems integrator and we just recently got a request to build a brand new, SLC-based automation system. We managed to talk them out of it thankfully, but that platform has some longevity to it. They're actually the bane of the Rockwell Rep's existence. They're constantly pushing people to get rid of all their SLC stuff, but it's been in there for years and works good, so why?

And once you go outside Rockwell, other manufacturers change their product lines even less often. Modicon, GE, Mitsubishi, still selling the same hardware they were selling 20 years ago. One of the major reasons for upgrading PLC hardware is so it can integrate with newer PC hardware and platforms better.

I love CoDeSys and love playing with it on the Raspberry Pi.

The attached image is the reason I would not use a Raspberry Pi in a real world automation application (this is from the 3S Data Sheet for CoDeSys for Raspberry Pi):

If anything ever happened to hurt someone on a machine controlled by one of these we would be in big trouble when the lawyers found this little tidbit of information. Whether or not the Pi was at fault, this is evidence enough that whomever designed and implemented the control system was not following the rules and there would be almost zero chance to defend against this.

harryting said:

For a lot of industrial application, the hardware price is a rounding error compared to down time. I have walked into plants that I never been before and get Rockwell stuff running with no documentation beside what the operators are able to tell me. I just don't see that with audino or Pi. this is not even bringing up the environmental factor.

Click to expand...

Spot on. I've been into places where downtime costs them in the order of 4 figures per minute. If an onsite maintenance technician can get a PLC up and running again even so much as 5 minutes faster than you can get an IT guy in to get the Raspberry Pi sorted out, you've already paid for the PLC.

Manglemender said:

I have demo'd the Codesys control for Pi in the office and it is a great learning/development tool but I haven't used one for a real project. But for Home automation... It would be better suited.

Click to expand...

PLC from the likes Rockwell and Siemens consist of a PLC platform running on top of micro-controller; you just don't really see the micro-controller unless you look in deep. In this respect, running Codesys on a Pi is no different except for the fact that it is made clear that the PI version is not intended for field deployment.

As for longevity and supportability: I think that Codesys and IEC61131 are going to be with us for many years to come and you can use standard I/O modules on Modbus etc.

The chances are very high that you will already have similar micro-controllers embedded in devices in your home already: Wireless Router? Satellite TV? Media streamer?

Nick