4 ms·

I worry about this. It compromises the brand if they are willing to cheap out on automation hardware at this level. What else are they cheaping out on? Point b

by unxdfa 4y ago

I worry about this. It compromises the brand if they are willing to cheap out on automation hardware at this level. What else are they cheaping out on? Point being there's almost absolutely no reason why they should have used a raspberry Pi in this environment. They have poor power management, EMI resilience, terrible enclosures as a rule and are somewhat prone to fucking out spontaneously with things like SD corruption. Your warranty and service options are basically the trash can. If a station goes down, what happens to your line? The entire cost-benefit analysis is probably wrong here. If it were me I'd buy one of the cheap Lenovo industrial mini PCs and get 5y NBD warranty, actually tested Ubuntu support, without all the other issues and buy an extra one. They have the cash sitting around to do this properly. Incidentally also none of this is really special. We were doing exactly this with recycled PC desktops 25 years ago running stuff in VB6 on windows NT on much larger and higher revenue and audit-heavy engineering lines. The software is a separate issue. Buying that in is usually expensive and problem-ridden.

jacquesm 4y ago
What it shows is just one thing: that having a 'call for pricing' blurb on your website, which is pretty much the norm for anything beyond the most trivial industrial automation hardware is a showstopper for many people. They just want to solve their problem, preferably today but tomorrow will do. Not go through the endless filters-of-revenue-extraction that the regular industry purchase trajectory will subject you to. Exactly the same thing happened in the 80's with personal computers. Suddenly you didn't need to wait for the accounting department to write their purchase order after 'their' sales department had - reluctantly - come to an agreement with 'your' bean counters about what the budget was and how you were going to have to do with less of what you needed but more than what they really would have liked to give you. A RasPi fits within any discretionary spending budget, there likely isn't even a write-off on them, it's just booked as costs in the year it is expended. And associated bits and bobs for sensors and actuators will be bolted on as needed. In the end it may not be the best or the cheapest solution but "now" beats "someday" in many industries. I personally see this as exactly the reason why Brompton is the breakout success that it is: they show adaptability rather than to play by the book.
- unxdfa 4y ago
  Well it's not really though. You just buy it from Farnell or RS here in the UK and it arrives the next day. I mean you literally just buy an Omron PLC and the ethernet board and RTFM much like you have to do with the Pi. Your point about the cost is right but you have to ask where the cost is: some guy spending two months working out how to interface a Pi to something or this being canned and your ask being process modelling. At the same time that guy is then upskilled in fairly generic automation which can be used at other levels across the business. It's very easy to write off unproductive uses of employee time. Brompton is a success but I'm not sure why. The bikes are by far the most horrible thing I've ridden other than the Sinclair A-bike. I'd rather walk.
  - sulcate 4y ago
    Omron doesn't offer an $80 PLC with gpio that runs python and can directly integrate with your ERP and other software like REST / SQL that anyone could teach themselves if they know python. If it takes two months to create a fully developed local, customized visual build out and assembly accounting software stack that also interfaces with torque sensors and serialization like this one, why is that any kind of a loss? How is integrating a pi with other systems any less valuable of a skill that isn't applicable across other sides of the business, compared to the very narrow task of integrating slow moving PLC hardware that has clunky ass proprietary software most of the time? I don't know if you've worked in industry, but companies actually won't invest in their local employee to get trained on 'industry standard' automation hardware. They contract that out. So you have no one on site who knows how anything works, half the time. The choices are often "pay s ton and have all the traditional investment of time in a contractor setting up PLC hardware and finding external software integrators to do all the other actual useful stuff you want, or just don't do the project because all of that is expensive and resource intensive."
    - unxdfa 4y ago
      There is no way a Pi with GPIO should be anywhere near any industrial equipment. I have worked in the industry and it has been a mix of in-house and hired cabinet chimps. If you have the time and money to work out how to interface a Pi to GPIO and write a software front end, you have the time and money to buy a PLC and integrate that with a COTS HMI front end.
a_humean 4y ago
I think a more positive take away is that this is a relatively small traditional manufacturing business with a few hundred employees that managed to automate a lot of their workflows at a small captial cost using off the shelf components and a willingness to take a stab at skilling up their own staff to build a solution to solve their usecase. The alternative is hiring a consultancy that may or may not actually deliver anything worthwhile at the cost of many thousands a day and leaving you with a solution that you cannot maintain because you completely lack the internal compentence as a consequence of outsourcing all of the development in the first place. More small/medium sized businesses should take risks like this. We should honestly be questioning, esp in the UK, the degree to which we depend upon consultants for seemlingly everything and how little businesses and government are willing to invest in taking small bets on their own employees over hiring frankly overpriced consultants from Accenture or McKinsey who are often expensive suits backed by a bunch of very recent graduates with little or no experience.
- sulcate 4y ago
  Yes, absolutely! But a part that's missing is the reason WHY companies often prefer to hire inefficient outside consultants that will under deliver, over promise, and often leave you with a half functional system at the end. It's for class politics and control reasons that managers and executives don't want to invest in on-site talent to expand their skills. They want disposable labor even if it costs them more money in the end, because it's a decision motivated by their power interests. They don't want to depend on on-site talent, they don't want to promote you, they don't want to pay you what you are worth, they don't want your talents to develop. They want to pay an outside agency whatever amount of money for the promise of a system, because even if the consultant fails they have fulfilled their capitalist due diligence and did things the right way, rather than having had local employees that are crucial to you that you invest in do work for you. If you take issue with this characterization, I'd ask you why do many people here find it notable that this company had an existing employee develop a system rather than just dragging in the consultants.
  - a_humean 4y ago
    I don't disagree that there might be a class issue involved esp in UK workplaces, but there is also this mystery that it seems like everyone knows that the big consultancies fail to deliver much more often than than they succeed by everyone except for the people in management with the budgets to hire these people. They are parasites on both the private sector, public sectors, and even government policy development. I actually suspect its corruption more than classism. I am speaking as someone that used to be one of those pink face graduates behind the expensive suits that was horrified at how hollowed out so many of our publically traded companies and government are.

by unxdfa 4y ago

jacquesm 4y ago

What it shows is just one thing: that having a 'call for pricing' blurb on your website, which is pretty much the norm for anything beyond the most trivial industrial automation hardware is a showstopper for many people. They just want to solve their problem, preferably today but tomorrow will do. Not go through the endless filters-of-revenue-extraction that the regular industry purchase trajectory will subject you to. Exactly the same thing happened in the 80's with personal computers. Suddenly you didn't need to wait for the accounting department to write their purchase order after 'their' sales department had - reluctantly - come to an agreement with 'your' bean counters about what the budget was and how you were going to have to do with less of what you needed but more than what they really would have liked to give you. A RasPi fits within any discretionary spending budget, there likely isn't even a write-off on them, it's just booked as costs in the year it is expended. And associated bits and bobs for sensors and actuators will be bolted on as needed. In the end it may not be the best or the cheapest solution but "now" beats "someday" in many industries. I personally see this as exactly the reason why Brompton is the breakout success that it is: they show adaptability rather than to play by the book.

unxdfa 4y ago
Well it's not really though. You just buy it from Farnell or RS here in the UK and it arrives the next day. I mean you literally just buy an Omron PLC and the ethernet board and RTFM much like you have to do with the Pi. Your point about the cost is right but you have to ask where the cost is: some guy spending two months working out how to interface a Pi to something or this being canned and your ask being process modelling. At the same time that guy is then upskilled in fairly generic automation which can be used at other levels across the business. It's very easy to write off unproductive uses of employee time. Brompton is a success but I'm not sure why. The bikes are by far the most horrible thing I've ridden other than the Sinclair A-bike. I'd rather walk.
- sulcate 4y ago
  Omron doesn't offer an $80 PLC with gpio that runs python and can directly integrate with your ERP and other software like REST / SQL that anyone could teach themselves if they know python. If it takes two months to create a fully developed local, customized visual build out and assembly accounting software stack that also interfaces with torque sensors and serialization like this one, why is that any kind of a loss? How is integrating a pi with other systems any less valuable of a skill that isn't applicable across other sides of the business, compared to the very narrow task of integrating slow moving PLC hardware that has clunky ass proprietary software most of the time? I don't know if you've worked in industry, but companies actually won't invest in their local employee to get trained on 'industry standard' automation hardware. They contract that out. So you have no one on site who knows how anything works, half the time. The choices are often "pay s ton and have all the traditional investment of time in a contractor setting up PLC hardware and finding external software integrators to do all the other actual useful stuff you want, or just don't do the project because all of that is expensive and resource intensive."
  - unxdfa 4y ago
    There is no way a Pi with GPIO should be anywhere near any industrial equipment. I have worked in the industry and it has been a mix of in-house and hired cabinet chimps. If you have the time and money to work out how to interface a Pi to GPIO and write a software front end, you have the time and money to buy a PLC and integrate that with a COTS HMI front end.

a_humean 4y ago

I think a more positive take away is that this is a relatively small traditional manufacturing business with a few hundred employees that managed to automate a lot of their workflows at a small captial cost using off the shelf components and a willingness to take a stab at skilling up their own staff to build a solution to solve their usecase. The alternative is hiring a consultancy that may or may not actually deliver anything worthwhile at the cost of many thousands a day and leaving you with a solution that you cannot maintain because you completely lack the internal compentence as a consequence of outsourcing all of the development in the first place. More small/medium sized businesses should take risks like this. We should honestly be questioning, esp in the UK, the degree to which we depend upon consultants for seemlingly everything and how little businesses and government are willing to invest in taking small bets on their own employees over hiring frankly overpriced consultants from Accenture or McKinsey who are often expensive suits backed by a bunch of very recent graduates with little or no experience.

sulcate 4y ago
Yes, absolutely! But a part that's missing is the reason WHY companies often prefer to hire inefficient outside consultants that will under deliver, over promise, and often leave you with a half functional system at the end. It's for class politics and control reasons that managers and executives don't want to invest in on-site talent to expand their skills. They want disposable labor even if it costs them more money in the end, because it's a decision motivated by their power interests. They don't want to depend on on-site talent, they don't want to promote you, they don't want to pay you what you are worth, they don't want your talents to develop. They want to pay an outside agency whatever amount of money for the promise of a system, because even if the consultant fails they have fulfilled their capitalist due diligence and did things the right way, rather than having had local employees that are crucial to you that you invest in do work for you. If you take issue with this characterization, I'd ask you why do many people here find it notable that this company had an existing employee develop a system rather than just dragging in the consultants.
- a_humean 4y ago
  I don't disagree that there might be a class issue involved esp in UK workplaces, but there is also this mystery that it seems like everyone knows that the big consultancies fail to deliver much more often than than they succeed by everyone except for the people in management with the budgets to hire these people. They are parasites on both the private sector, public sectors, and even government policy development. I actually suspect its corruption more than classism. I am speaking as someone that used to be one of those pink face graduates behind the expensive suits that was horrified at how hollowed out so many of our publically traded companies and government are.