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Strato Pi – An Industrial Raspberry Pi
- dev_dull 8y ago> Hardware watchdog I thought the broadcom chip provided a hw watchdog that's integrated directly into the linux kernel?
- mlaretallack 8y agoIts usual for an external watchdog to be added for industrial applications that cannot be disable ( or fail to be enabled) by firmware/software.
- comboy 8y agoOh wow, thanks. I'm using rpis in my home automation and never knew about it. I've been using micros (mostly arduino) as watchdogs. This sounds so much better.
- wigiv 8y agoIt's nice to see more options becoming available in this space. Industrial PCs (and, in the same vein, PLCs) from the old-guard industrial automation providers are generally lackluster for the cost, in my experience. So many acts of industrial automation and robotic system integration can be achieved with a Raspberry Pi and/or an Arduino, with a little hardening.
- berbec 8y agoI know I'm not the target market for their UPS addon, but is 91.00€ for a UPS board [1] that does not include the required lead-acid battery sound reasonable? I know they have gone through the certification process for everything, but doesn't this seem fairly high? The battery is not lithium, but lead-acid. For an application using a Raspberry Pi, I generally assume size is a fairly major consideration. Considering a lead acid battery will need to be three times the size for similar charge capacity, doesn't this battery chemistry choice seem very strange? A quick google brought me to the PiJuice HAT [2], a $54 piHAT, with an included 1820mAH LiPo. This device also doesn't massively increase the size of the Pi. PiJuice claims "~4 to 6 hours in constant use". Let us assume this is a vastly inflated figure designed by the marketing department. Isn't 2 hours run time more than enough for a UPS? If the power failure is longer, I want my UPS to allow me to safely shut down my gear. 1: https://www.sferalabs.cc/product/strato-pi-ups-board/ https://www.sferalabs.cc/product/strato-pi-ups-board/ 2: https://ameridroid.com/products/pijuice-hat-1 https://ameridroid.com/products/pijuice-hat-1
- FullyFunctional 8y agoLiPo is a really terrible choice for a UPS; it'll wear out quite quickly. LiFo is way better, like this: https://www.crowdsupply.com/silicognition/lifepo4wered-pi-plus https://www.crowdsupply.com/silicognition/lifepo4wered-pi-pl...
- snovv_crash 8y agoLiFePO4 is also much more fire resistant due to punctures, shocks and overcharging, which is also good for an industrial setting.
- pavs 8y agoLitium battery backup and UPS is two different things.
- gsich 8y agoLead batteries are cheap.
- falcolas 8y agoAnd reliable, and they're OK with being cycled frequently. Their failure mode also doesn't include the words "chemical fire".
- snovv_crash 8y agoThey actually aren't good at being cycled if you go further than about 50% discharge, less than 10. Otherwise it gets 500 cycles. Lithium Ion also gets 500 cycles, but can go up to 2000 cycles if you stay between 10% and 90%.
- gsich 8y agoTrue. But you usually don't cycle UPS batteries that much. If you do you probably have bigger problems with your power supply. There are some cycle lead batteries though, sometimes called "solar batteries".
- dsl 8y agoIt is awesome to see battery backup being added to the Pi. There aren't any good solutions currently short of a full on UPS or a consumer grade battery pack.
- ynezz 8y agohttp://www.mini-box.com/site/ComparisonChart-UPS.htm http://www.mini-box.com/site/ComparisonChart-UPS.htm
- Havoc 8y agoWell given that the raspberry is decidedly consumer grade too I don't see an issue with running it off a name brand powerbank.
- bonzini 8y agoAdaFruit's "Powerboost 1000 charger" is not cheap but it's very good and also has USB power pass-through pin, in order to detect power failures. However you will need a 5V-3.3V level converter to feed it to the RPi's GPIO pins.
- ficklepickle 8y agoI got some clones of these made in China to save money. All in all, pretty happy. Although they really need a heatsink if you want to push 1A continuously, and the IC is so small it is hard to dissipate all that heat. One of them will push as much current as possible until it overheats and shuts off, but the rest seem fine. I plan on trying to use 2 in parallel to make a UPS for my pi. I've used one with good results on a low power IoT door unlocker. When the door is closed, a Qi charger make contact and powers the device. When the door is open, it runs off battery.
- plumeria 8y agoAnother option worth considering is the Modberry: https://modberry.techbase.eu/ https://modberry.techbase.eu/
- tomcam 8y agoLogin just to see the prices? Classy!
- heinrichhartman 8y agoIndeed. WTF?
- stevew20 8y agoLocal strip club has same practice. It is to keep you from making bad decision, unless you are really, really sure you want to make bad decision.
- plumeria 8y agoWell, we ended up quoting a custom build with them, and it was slightly cheaper than the Strato Pi. I agree that pricing information for standard configurations should be available.
- nimbius 8y agoIve worked in industrial manufacturing before, and I presently work as an engine mechanic in a small chain of midwestern diesel repair stores. I use regular raspberry pi's to pull data from ECU/OBD systems, and I even store that data on a PI server as part of a customers work ticket data. the problem with anything thats 'industrialized' is that so many companies use this as a chance to gin up the price and double down on rent-seeking behavior. This thing takes a $45 pi and jacks the price up to $250USD. Some of the goofier features include: - on-board buzzer. You know, because over the constant din of lathe, shave, and heat treat assembly line systems you're surely going to pay attention to the buzzer from something the size of a pack of smokes. anything essential should be shown on the light tower or picked up by QA. - standard RS-232 and RS-485 interfaces to the Raspberry Pi serial line, with opto-isolator and electrostatic discharge protection: Motoman, Fanuc, Mitsubishi, and almost every other automation hardware have used cat5 for a decade. doesnt the pi have grounded cat5? CAN network support - god no. This jumps into the realm of medical systems, elevator controls, and passenger vehicles. all of these are made of intrinsically isolated circuits and go through some of the most rigorous testing imaginable. For example, RF leakage common in a PI could cause aberrant failures or signaling problems in robotics that arent expecting it. CAN type controllers can withstand shock/heat/humidity many times that of what a normal computer can handle. Introducing the PI as a CAN device is asking for grievous bodily harm as a service.
- Tomte 8y agoThose industrial Pis offer things that are absoklutely important to many industrial users. Maybe not for you, but they have their market: DIN rail mounting, I/O modules, ESD/EMI lab results, conformance to electrical standards etc. pp. Another one, probably better known is the Revolution Pi (https://revolution.kunbus.de https://revolution.kunbus.de).
- 52-6F-62 8y agoI fully appreciate the applications you listed as rendering the pi insufficient. I can however see potential use cases in industrial film and television lighting where controllers were often 100% proprietary and vastly more expensive and you’d generally have a large array of them on large productions. This isn’t a life or death scenario and these are cheap enough to have a spare or two on hand that could likely be compiled and written inside of an hour or two and connected within minutes. And as another user mentioned, brings the units up to electrical safety standards in such environments. It wasn’t my field so I don’t know for sure, but it seems like it could be useful.
- kehrlann 8y agoI've had numerous failures on older RPi models due to SD card corruption, even in non-write intensive contexts. Not sure this is good enough when you want reliability...
- TickleSteve 8y agoThats a well known issue with standard distributions, and there are fairly well known ways around it... Basically, don't do continuous writing to the card, turn off atime updates,possibly even work entirely from the initrd if possible. Also, use proper industrial sd cards, these have proper wear-levelling and bad-block management unlike the consumer cards. In other words, treat it as an embedded system and tailor it to your use-case.
- anfractuosity 8y agoatime refers to timestamping of files with their access time right? That sounds interesting re. turning off atime updates, how do you do that out of interest?
- Fnoord 8y ago> how do you do that out of interest? Mount with -o noatime. The default (-o relatime) should however be good enough for most situations.
- rad_gruchalski 8y agonoatime mount option
- sgt 8y agoI've tried all these "ways around it", but SD card corruption still happens on Raspberry Pi's. We use them as dashboards around the office so having them running 24/7 really tests these devices. I've found that the only working recipe for a stable Raspberry Pi is a USB hard drive (prefer SSD but mechanical also fine), and a UPS. My simple advice is: do not try to run Raspberry Pi from SD cards in "production" under any circumstances on a large scale, as you will run into filesystem corruption and create a lot of work for yourself.
- pmontra 8y agoA feature I didn't see anywhere is the ability to start the PI at a given time or after receiving a wake on LAN packet. This would be useful in several scenarios like performing some task, shutdown and boot again later, maybe at a time programmed by the PI itself.
- Doxin 8y agoa RPI uses so little power that it makes no sense to do wake-on-lan, and indeed the RPI doesn't support wake on lan at all. Just leave it on and idle.
- tossaway44 8y agoThe other day I saw someone commenting on aMLC SD cards and their increased tolerance to sudden power loss and generally rougher conditions. Can’t find it, though. Anyone have a link?
- Fnoord 8y agoI wrote about this in the past various times. For example here [1]. I learned about it from HN as well though. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18275494 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18275494
- snops 8y agoThe big problem with using the raspberry pi in industrial applications is the single source and short production lifespan gauruntee (6 years [1]) making maintainance or long term production difficult. Industrial machines (e.g. printing presses) will easily last decades, and you often hear of problems finding suitable replacement electronics for them, so basing your control system on a single sourced component is a bit dangerous. Other single board computers or system on module offer 10 year production lifetimes from introduction, e.g Variscite. This is possible as the manufacturer of the SoC (generally NXP or TI) also gauruntee to produce the silicon for 10 years, and as (unlike Broadcom) they will sell to anyone, alternative boards are available with the same processor should one board manufacturer go bust. They are a bit more expensive, but a trivial percent of the overall cost for an industrial application, and the difference isn't that much once you add a case, protection, industrial power supply etc. 1. https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=193995 https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=193995.
- DrNuke 8y agoThese customised Pi packages are hit and miss indeed but you can very often find a pretty neat plug-and-play solution for your particular problem that saves you time, so paying $150 instead of $75 is great ROI for your business.
- antpls 8y agoCould this be used for space projects, like satellites? (Thinking about the name)
- pas 8y agoThe rPi chip itself is not rad-hardened, so it'd require a bulky shielding, that'd increase the launch mass, which is a lot more expensive than a more space suited chip. Also, launching into space requires a lot better electronics. Sure, it'd work likely, but .. when a launch is that expensive, you wouldn't accept these risks.
- camtarn 8y agoAs an example of how we might consider using these: We work on a lot of short-lived one-off experimental projects, and we currently use B&R industrial controllers for more or less everything. However, these use a clunky Windows-only development environment and can only be programmed in C/C++. For some projects - e.g. putting a data logger in a low voltage electrical cabinet, which interfaces to some gear using serial/modbus/CAN and analog/digital I/O and uploads the results to the cloud - this could potentially be quite useful. We don't often work on safety-critical systems, or require 5-nines uptime. The only thing is that this system isn't that cheap compared to B&R gear, although not having to pay a subscription for the dev environment helps.
- halbritt 8y agoI've been testing this one from Balena (formerly Resin) https://www.balena.io/fin/ https://www.balena.io/fin/ It's a carrier for the Raspberry Pi compute module. Solves many of the problems it has in an industrial environment. It takes 6-24vdc, has real eMMC storage, an RTC, a hardware coprocessor that can be used as a watchdog and an mPCIE. I think there's a DIN case for it as well. All that for a bit over a hundred dollars plus the $40 for the compute module. That seems pretty decent at that price. The next step up seems to be a "cheap" x86 IPC at a few hundred dollars.
- syntaxing 8y agoI can see specific usage of these but probably not large scale usage. Industrial things need to work 100% of the time and has to easily talk to other devices reliably usually in the form of some redudant network. It'll be pretty hard to convince engineers to use these on industrial equipment. The early 2010s were extremely lack luster for industrial electronics technological advancement. Everything you used were ancient (development of them started probably before I was born). But the mass adoption of Ethernet/ethercat have been speeding things up.
- mdturnerphys 8y agoI've been using the PLCs from UniPi [0] for a few months. They started with Raspberry-Pi-based systems but now have a Allwinner-H5-based system with built in memory. They have a significant number of digital and analog ports, depending on the model, and work with a number of different programming solutions. [0] https://www.unipi.technology/ https://www.unipi.technology/
- qwerty456127 8y agoCool but is there something similar yet less expensive for not-really-industrial usage? Built-in UPS and hardware watchdog seem really valuable for almost everybody.