Thoughts on new Siemens SIMATIC IOT20xx devices?

Ran across this on LinkedIn: https://www.rs-online.com/designspa...www.rs-online.com/designspark/simatic-iot2020

Siemens page: http://w3.siemens.com/mcms/pc-based-automation/en/industrial-iot/Pages/Default.aspx

It's toted as an IoT gateway, but essentially it's just another DIN rail mount Linux computer. Don't care about it using Arduino shields etc. Not a big deal right? Except these guys get it and apparently it will be UL!

What's more, it's reasonably priced: http://www.alliedelec.com/siemens-6es7647-0aa00-1ya2/70949654/

Anyway, very likely I will buy one of these to play with soon, very reasonably priced, UL, 1 GB of RAM to play with, 2x RS485 and 2x Ethernet, and the version of Yocto Linux that ships with it is fairly modern (Linux kernel version 4.4, not some dinosauric 2.x or 3.x ****).

Would like to hear others' thoughts on it.

I think the whole IoT thing puts the industry/vendors in a weird space. A lot of the ideas (smart sensors & ethernet) have been available in some form for a while, but many sectors are still setting standards for what they'll expect in the future.

Part of IoT is mixing hobbyist/maker level equipment into control systems. Some people have been using arduinos for years, and if they fail, meh, its cheap, I'll keep a spare or two. Cost is the driving factor there.

To me a product like this brings that level of functionality in an industrial housing, 35mm din rail mount, etc. It's an interesting middle ground between the full hobbyist system and a "real" PC. No graphics card, but two Ethernet interfaces.

Its an product to fill a niche that's sorta empty at the moment, which is usually a good sign. The question I see is how many times this will come into play as actually useful at the right price point. I dunno.

Thanks for pointing it out.. I will test it for sure..

For our systems (very small), but wanting to do things that only a "real" computer can do (e.g. DSP), an embedded PC + RS485-connected I/O is very attractive.

Right now there are a lot of DIN rail mount PCs out there, but the majority are not UL, which is required in all our cases. The ones that are UL are hundreds/thousands USD more than they should sell for (talking about small boards that cost $200 max at full-price retail for everything). Some of the ARM-based SBCs that these are based on are <$50. Not going to pay a 800% premium just cause someone designed a mount for it.

So right now, we just have ordinary PLCs to keep costs down.

Honestly fairly excited about this, just pre-ordered one out of pocket. Siemens is indirectly targeting the hobby crowd that messes around with Arduinos and Raspberry Pi's in their free time, which is genius. They've already set up an online forum for it, and I've already seen blog posts for it. Genius.

Also, this offering (lower-speed RISC but paired with 1 GB RAM) fills a huge void in the existing offerings. A lot of situations could be fulfilled with a lower speed, perhaps older RISC processor (you can do a lot with 200 MHz!) but we need more than 64 MB of RAM to still be effective.

If anyone from Siemens can see this, get OpenWrt on that ASAP and you'll really have a winner. It has that written all over it with two Ethernet ports.

It says in the FAQ page that you linked to:

Regarding communication protocols, IOT2020 can communicate with other industrial hardware by using secure industrial protocols such as Modbus, PROFINET, and MQTT.

Click to expand...

Does this mean it has a Profinet stack right out of the box ?

According to their forum, a PROFINET driver is planned for next year. This basically just came out and they are in the process of getting a lot of different software working on it. Right now they have Yocto Linux and a lot of the stuff that came with Intel Galileo boards, such as libmraa (for low-level I/O).