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Arduino unveils the Opta – “Micro PLC” for industrial IoT
- mikewarot 4y agoI looked at the specs, I didn't see a dedicated processor doing the Ladder Logic / Modules part. Perhaps they dedicate one core to it... but that's a lot more janky than a separate CPU at about a dollar or two. I wouldn't want WiFi, Ethernet, or any other IO crashing the Controller. It has to be rock solid.
- numlock86 4y agoThe STM32 series don't have any BLE/WiFi solutions built in yet. Since it's "Arduino" I assume it's a NINA module or similar from u-blox as a "co-processor" over UART with an AT command interface, which is basically a brandlabeled ESP32 with some firmware enhancements they already use on other products that focus on IoT.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- mbanzi 4y agoit's not an ESP32 it's an high quality Murata/Cypress module this is the datasheet https://content.arduino.cc/assets/Arduino-Portenta-H7_Datasheet_Murata-1dx.pdf https://content.arduino.cc/assets/Arduino-Portenta-H7_Datash...
- numlock86 4y agoGood to know, so it's something to avoid. I had to deal with a lot of the wireless modules from Infineon and let's just say the support was ... hm, I guess terrible would be a pretty mild term in that regard.
- gaudat 4y agoBeing marketed as an IIoT device differentiates it from classical "mission critical/rock solid" PLC modules I guess. Treat it as an Arduino with WiF and Ethernet but with friendly screw terminals and connectors instead of needing a shield for interfacing te traditional sensors and actuators. And with an woefully overpowered microcontroller.
- mbanzi 4y agoHi the main processor is made of 2 separate cores and they can run different software. The processor we use it's the top of the line for STM so it's not a dollar or two. The separation between the two cores is much more well defined that people might think. The Wifi BT is managed by a separate module with its own separate processor (The Wifi/BT is also optional on most models)
- duskwuff 4y ago> The separation between the two cores is much more well defined that people might think. What separation do you think there is? The M7 and M4 cores on a dual-core STM32H7 share all of their peripherals and memory (with the exception of CCM and I$/D$ on the M7). There is virtually no separation between them; they can even run the exact same code with a bit of wrangling. There isn't even any provision for firewalling the two off from each other. If you were planning on treating the fact that the part had two cores as a safety feature, you need to reconsider that.
- DannyBee 4y agoI do a lot of PLC work. The Arduino IDE is totally unsuitable for it. No idea what they are doing about this. It would take an amazing amount of work to fix this. As for PLC functionality people actually use, the product page says "Optional support for standard IEC 61131-3 PLC languages". This is what folks use for real. I presume this means "we didn't want to pay CodeSys but you can". Or something. That sucks. Maybe they are relying on MBed support as their basic realtime story but, as mentioned, their dev environment is unsuitable for this kind of work. There is no mention of expected scan time for ladders or guaranteed latency for anything else So for the intended market, this doesn't look interesting so far. It seems like it will go the way of the x8 and land with a huge thud. For a random person wanting an Arduino in a cabinet on a din rail, I can see maybe they'd use it.
- numlock86 4y agoThe target audience is "industry/professional IoT". I guess this is mainly targeted at prototyping projects or hooking something existing up to the web with some "realtime" I/Os, giving people the opportunity to stick to 61131. Existing solutions that offer you BLE/WiFi in this sector are usually terrible and just branded routers with "industrial grade" components. This is probably not suited for or targeted at automating your next big high-runner molding machine or high-speed motion-controlled application, as you already figured out.
- readenough 4y agoI agree. It really helps to read the description and not just the title. I have been in industrial controls since 1980, so I'm I'm not so quick to dismiss the introduction of the next new thing. Ten years ago, when the Raspberry PI was introduced, I didn't expect to see it as the go to thin client for manufacturing floor HMIs. Yet, in some, very large and well funded plants, it is. Am I ready to put the Opta in mission critical control? No. Am I happy to see a more open option for IoT? Yes.
- DannyBee 4y agoThat's unfair - I read the description at length, and quite honestly, I still can't understand why i'd ever use it. It looks like buzzwords over real use-cases. The partner, Finder, is known for making these types of devices, and outside of the "Arduino" stamp, they've made a device that has been in-market (and relatievly unused) for half a decade already. This will not be a real option for IOT. For what they are trying to claim is the target, I'd either use a PLC, or to your point, i'd mount a raspberry pi or embedded arm device. As you say, the raspberry PI i understand - people need something to drive HMI/etc that isn't the horrible mess that most automation providers provide. They want something to just hook a camera up to and not worry about spending 2 years writing codesys drivers or whatever. This is trying to tread a middle ground, but the middle ground has better options - industrial PI with builtin PLC support, for example (https://www.industrialshields.com/industrial-plc-raspberry-pi-202007 https://www.industrialshields.com/industrial-plc-raspberry-p...) That's because Arduino is sort of the worst of both worlds - they are actually horrible at pretty horrible at WiFi. Bluetooth i haven't tried in a while but it was also really bad. They are okay at I/O, but nothing is guaranteed in a meaningful way. So as an option for IoT, it sucks. At a slightly higher level, NRF does a much better job of producing rock-solid devices and ecosystem that can do bluetooth/wifi well, and throw in I/O. At a lower level, everything equally sucks at wifi/bluetooth as this thing.
- gaudat 4y agoIs STM32 still in shortage? I remember it being the largest blocker in one of my projects last year. Especially that high end H7 chip. Oh and we runned a Tensorflow Lite image processing pipeline on that chip. It is probably a few times too powerful for fiddling pins and an IP stack.
- ISL 4y ago> It is probably a few times too powerful for fiddling pins and an IP stack. Then it'll definitely do the job!
- oytis 4y agoMaybe they took it because it's dual core? Running everything connectivity-related on one CPU and have real-time code own the other one completely seems to be a good idea to me.
- numlock86 4y ago> Is STM32 still in shortage? In some cases they've never been. It depends on the series. A lot of their portfolio is being made in external fabs like TSMC, whose allocations they gave up when Corona started as they were thinking the chip demand will go down. (Oh boy were they wrong.) On the other hand they still had allocations (in their "own" fabs), so depending on what you want they deliver. Problem is basically anything "mainstream" was in external fabs, e.g. the entire STM32F0 to STM32F4 series. In contrast, if you want an STM32L0 oder STM32L4, you can still order like nothing happened.
- fps-hero 4y agoBased on what you could buy through distributors, less than 5% of the STM32 lineup is available to buy. The situation was worse, 6 months ago there were 27 variants available on Digikey of the 3000 or so they make. The G series seems to have good availability at the moment, if I was going to bet on a MCU for a new design that would be it. L series has only just gotten better, couldn’t get them a few months ago. Some F3 chips have been looked over (didn’t go out of stock) despite being more advanced than their F4 counterparts. That’s marketing I guess.
- spyremeown 4y agoArduino, for some God forsaken reason, is trying to appeal to the professional market with the most backward decisions possible. This will be the same thing as the Portenta, which sucks because of the software lockdown (they don't even have an Yocto layer for it and pretty much force you to use Foundries.io).
- mbanzi 4y agoHi we're working in the professional market because the market is requesting it. The Portenta is a family made of a number of devices. I think you're referring to the Portenta X8. Obviously we favor the use of Foundries because it provides the user experience we need for a lot of our customer. The Portenta X8 is not "lockdown" you can install what you want. Customers can request a different system software and we help them run it. I think it might be possible make a generic Yocto layer available for download if there is enough request
- westmeal 4y agoIt's OK I still love you guys. Admittedly I'm a hobbyist though.
- samtho 4y agoI blame this on the implicit demands of the industrial markets endless fascination on the Raspberry Pi “platform” which has made actually getting your hands on one very difficult. Arduino is trying to also satisfy this market by offering a more targeted/discrete solution rather than a full Linux system. I think where they are misguided is that there are these sort of PLCs available at a lower cost today and people opt for the Raspberry Pi precisely for the flexibility afforded to them by a full Linux system.
- gw98 4y agoI don't get the market position of this. A number of Chinese companies produce DIN rail mounted PLCs which already cover this market, cost virtually nothing and actually emulate Mitsu GX ones so work with existing off the shelf tools and have the same real time guarantees as the commercial units. If you're going to cheap out, these are fine. But this isn't the problem. The expensive bit of a PLC is the dude perma-welded to the cabinet. Last thing people want to do is rock the boat by expanding the risk to a vendor like Arduino, which quite frankly doesn't have a great reputation or history of tested industrial or reliable hardware. It's better to pay 3x as much for a well established vendor.
- mbanzi 4y agoArduino has a very good reputation for reliable hardware. Obviously this applies to official products. Shitty chinese clones have bad reliability issues... Even some of those chinese clone PLCs are not spectacularly reliable... This is a professionally made device, developed in partnership with Finder which is a company with 70year of experience in making relays and other mission critical industrial equipment..
- gw98 4y agoNo the current Arduino ecosystem does not have a good reputation for reliable hardware at all. It does in your product echo chamber but quite frankly it's laughed out of the building in many professional settings and for good reason. The Chinese PLCs have somewhat more credibility there. The current hardware has little to no protection, poor power management, the software ecosystem is quite frankly dangerous in a lot of cases and the IDE only recently gained feature parity with tools we had 30 years ago. I'm quite willing to entertain that you are trying to get into the market and that these issues may be resolved with this product but you have a large reputation mountain to climb first. You have to build reputation not try and add it afterwards. To note I use Arduino projects usually for one off simple bench automation but nothing further than that. I tend to use them as a host for flat avr-libc / avr-gcc projects though, mostly because the old IDE and toolchain was absolutely dire.
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- idiotsecant 4y agoThe most fundamental miss here is the lack of live code editing. One of the basic things that makes PLCs a separate thing is that you can edit code live without stopping execution of the device. In real automation applications you can't shut down a plant or a line or a generator or whatever just because you want to add a new E-stop or change the timing on an actuator slightly or tune a PID etc. If you have to kill the machine to recompile this is not a PLC by any stretch of the imagination, it's an Arduino with a fancy box.
- PaulWaldman 4y agoI don't know about that. Siemens S7 PLCs are not capable of online edits and they have a massive install base. In the Rockwell / Allen-Bradley world, almost all PLCs support online edits.
- idiotsecant 4y ago>Siemens S7 PLCs >Real PLCs I don't think we're talking about the same thing!
- thedingwing 4y agoI don’t think this is discussed enough when PLCs are compared to other embedded systems (such as this product). Through a PLC’s IDE, which is almost always proprietary software provided by the PLC manufacturer, a developer has the ability to view variable values, edit their values, “force” or “lock” a variable to a specific value (making assignments to that variable a no-op), and make edits to the code logic. This can all be done while maintaining the realtime guarantees of the system. These features (called “online editing” by PLC manufacturers) are essential in many applications where PLCs are used and are the biggest differentiator between a PLC and any other embedded system, such as Arduino’s products. GDB-style debugging of a desktop program or JTAG/SWO debugging of a microcontroller can do some of what a PLC IDE can do, but it’s not as reliable and safe as PLC products.
- scoutt 4y agoThe main problem here is that the Arduino brand is currently paired with "maker". This was intentional, as they pushed so hard to reach this current status. Now the "maker" market seems to be declining. They have to go PRO. I know they have the "PRO" line, but the problem is that in professional settings it almost became a joke to even mention Arduino. For a time we had a lot of internal jokes around it (for example, one coworker, in interviews with candidates, always leaves the room as soon as the candidate mentions Arduino). Myself, I loved the UNO, the concept, the support and the community. Now I use it sometimes to test a 5V sensor or other I2C/SPI peripherals, when I'm not in the mood to use a 3.3V level translator. On the other hand, if the product is not a success, they might leave the product to die (anyone remember Arduino MKR Vidor 4000? the project last major update is 4 years ago). In that case, to me it means that I prefer to fully qualify and validate a chinese brand, purchase 10000 boards and forget about it. It will be very difficult to turn the things around for Arduino, to consolidate itself in other markets. I will take a while.
- colordrops 4y ago> one coworker, in interviews with candidates, always leaves the room as soon as the candidate mentions Arduino Sounds like these candidates dodged a bullet.
- PaulWaldman 4y agoIn the last 10 years the cost of small PLCs have plummeted. This is obviously a play to get users to buy into an ecosystem. You can buy one of these with a small amount of I/O for $1k. It includes a local distributor who will show up to your door and help you spec out equipment as well. The largest cost is the plant support techs who can troubleshoot and potentially modify PLC code. Many plants rely on electricians for this role. Electricians who can nearly follow ladder logic, which is modeled after wiring schematics.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- andromaton 4y agoRegarding the brand, there are lots of Arduino clones better than Arduino. Arduino is overpriced, buggy, big, slow to innovate. PLC programmers: +--| |--+--(represent!) +--| |--+ +--| |--+
- dmitrygr 4y agoWho the hell writes this stuff and why can they not be bothered to get even the simple basics right? > uses an STMicro STM32H747XI dual-core microcontroller, > which includes a single high-performance Arm Cortex-M7 > core running at up to 480MHz and a lower-power Cortex-M4 > core running at up to 240MHz alongside a shared > floating-point unit (FPU), The cores do NOT share an FPU. The M7 core has a built-in FPU capable of single and double precision. The M4 core has its own FPU, capable of only single-precision.
- duskwuff 4y agoWouldn't be the first time that Arduino got basic product specs wrong. They're still advertising the Vidor 4000 [1] as supporting "Mini PCI Express [...] for connecting your FPGA as a peripheral to a computer or to creat [sic] your own PCI interfaces" -- on an FPGA that lacks PCIe support. [1]: https://store.arduino.cc/products/arduino-mkr-vidor-4000 https://store.arduino.cc/products/arduino-mkr-vidor-4000
- marsven_422 4y ago
- numpad0 4y agoIs "brand loyalty" actually a thing? Personally I lean towards a thinking that product loyalty likely exist but the brand is just an aesthetic. To me, this one looks like a Starbucks branded coffee maker, or a Toyota branded bicycle, a company swag product line that are not what the brand represents but do technically belong to the similar extremely generalized categories. And, this won't take genius to figure out, so the real question is, why it's kept being done? This only erode a brand and plant doubts on corporate integrity into customer's minds.