Microcontrollers in an industrial environment?

[Boyko]

Do you have an experience with microcontrollers (PIC, AVR) in a hostile industrial environment. Are they apropriate to work in a place with a high humidity, extreme temperatures, vibrations, electromagnetic disturbances etc.

___________
Regards
Boyko

 

[Doug_Adam]

Do you have an experience with microcontrollers (PIC, AVR) in a hostile industrial environment. Are they apropriate to work in a place with a high humidity, extreme temperatures, vibrations, electromagnetic disturbances etc.

___________
Regards
Boyko

Both PIC and AVR have industrial and military spec microcontrollers available. Most of the intelligent equipment that I use will have microcontrollers of some sort driving the system. If you are building microcontroller based systems, then you will need more than just selecting the appropriate controller.
Examples, we use IP 67 I/O (ASi). This can handle 100% humidity, can be hosed down with high pressure water or completely covered in dust or other muck. It is also said to be vibration resistant, but the vibration in the area is not too bad. The method used to protect the electronics seems to be to embed it in a potting mix. EMC would require shielding, and possibly opto isolation or transformer isolation on the IO and power connections. Extreme temperatures would require all components to be fit for these conditions, as well as all joining to be up to standard.
So, to answer your questions, microcontrollers can operate in these conditions, and others have made them work under these conditions. My experience has been as an end user of standard, off the shelf products designed for these conditions, quite a few of which contain microcontrollers.

 

[jvdcande]

Every CPU and every intelligent periphery card in every PLC has a microprocessor or microcontroller as core. The ability to work in a place with a high humidity, extreme temperatures, vibrations, electromagnetic disturbances etc. comes from various sources: you can use special spec components or you can design the surrounding environment so these harsh conditions can be dealth with.

I once opened up a Siemens Simatic S5-95U CPU and found a fairly common 80C39 inside.

Kind regards,

 

[Boyko]

Yes if we read the manual theese MCUs should work. There are industrial versions of the chips. But the questions is can we make a noise resistant box with a PCB inside and mounted MCU on it?

 

[IO_Rack]

We use PIC's all over our plant. Some areas are very electrically noisy. We isolate the I/O optically and use shielded cable. We have no problems, the PIC's have proven to be very reliable to us.