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> For a small scale industrial process, even a really hacked together setup can work surprisingly well, and while you have a chance of running into some show st
by akiselev 4y ago
> For a small scale industrial process, even a really hacked together setup can work surprisingly well, and while you have a chance of running into some show stopping problem, there's an equal chance of the hacked together setup continuing to function for the required time. If labour to fix stuff and/or small enough scale to temporarily have a little downtime are effectively free, this can work out positively.
Can confirm that this is happening to some extent in biotech startups. Most of them don’t have the resources to hire grad students en masse to do the tedious labwork so they’re investing into lab automation. At the seed/series A level there usually isn’t enough money to splurge on brand name lab equipment beyond a few core pieces of equipment and with experiments running, there’s enough tech savvy downtime to experiment with hacky but cheap solutions. I’ve even seen HomeAssistant driven lab automation setups driven by AppDaemon apps with ESP32s used to control a mix of pumps and sensors (with CI/CD, though the whole thing was backed by a proper LIMS). It felt incredibly hacky but uptime was stellar once the SD card was replaced with an SSD.
It used to be that I had to go to Staubli or similar manufacturer and spec out a $50k robotic arm just to move plates from a liquid handler to the fridge. Now the same can be had for a few grand or less and there’s even open source options.
I see this PLC along those lines, where a lab might need to control a bunch of pumps and syringes with some synchronized via RS485 for realtime control and others on WiFi for less time sensitive stuff. A low cost PLC in that sweet spot between enterprise PLC and bare dev board could do really well.
These PLCs would be the perfect complement to ESP32s and RaspberryPi if they’re cheap enough to stockpile like RPis were preshortage. It’s unfortunate they haven’t published pricing yet, which tells me that it’ll be too expensive for hobbyists.