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Revolution Pi – Industrial PC Based on Raspberry Pi

revolution.kunbus.com

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Re: Revolution Pi – Industrial PC Based on Raspberry Pi

#21

Post by posguy »

learc83 wrote: post #6

This would have been perfect for my last startup. Keeping those damn Pi's running when they were deployed across the country was a nightmare. The SD cards had around a 20% failure rate per year. Eventually I just started shipping each system with a backup SD card taped to the inside of the case.

Were you using decent microSDs? Was each mSD getting QC'ed? We benchmark every single mSD before deploying an SBC with it, and have switched to only using Evo+ 32GB cards as they pass our QC 3/5 of the time, which is much better than the other available brands.

Also, mSD corruption means your using a mSD card with a bad controller. The mSD was bound to corrupt and was a low caliber card to start with, unless you are doing a bunch of writes a mSD should last 2 years minimum, if not longer.

Another tact to take would be to switch to an OrangePi PC+ (8GB eMMC included, $22) or similar, that way you know your getting good quality nand with a decent controller out of the box.

Re: Revolution Pi – Industrial PC Based on Raspberry Pi

#22

Post by l1k »

fest wrote: post #19
l1k wrote: post #13

Hi there. I'm an engineer on the Revolution Pi team. AMA.

It's hard to tell from pictures, but are do IO modules have pin-headers instead of wire terminals?

The I/O modules themselves have 2 pin headers with 14 pins each. The pin headers receive adapters with wire terminals. The adapters are included.

The German I/O module page has an animation which shows this in detail, it seems the English page is missing that for some reason:

https://revolution.kunbus.de/io-modul/

Re: Revolution Pi – Industrial PC Based on Raspberry Pi

#23

Post by fest »

l1k wrote: post #22
fest wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hard to tell from pictures, but are do IO modules have pin-headers instead of wire terminals?

The I/O modules themselves have 2 pin headers with 14 pins each. The pin headers receive adapters with wire terminals. The adapters are included. The German I/O module page has an animation which shows this in detail, it seems the English page is missing that for some reason: https://revolution.kunbus.de/io-modul/

That's great. Are there any modules with support for camera and/or screen (HDMI/DSI) planned?

Re: Revolution Pi – Industrial PC Based on Raspberry Pi

#24

Post by Normal_gaussian »

posguy wrote: post #21
learc83 wrote: post #6

This would have been perfect for my last startup. Keeping those damn Pi's running when they were deployed across the country was a nightmare. The SD cards had around a 20% failure rate per year. Eventually I just started shipping each system with a backup SD card taped to the inside of the case.

Were you using decent microSDs? Was each mSD getting QC'ed? We benchmark every single mSD before deploying an SBC with it, and have switched to only using Evo+ 32GB cards as they pass our QC 3/5 of the time, which is much better than the other available brands. Also, mSD corruption means your using a mSD card with a bad controller. The mSD was bound to corrupt and was a low caliber card to start with, unless you are…

Do you mind sharing your quality control method for this? We are hitting card issues on relatively low device numbers.

Re: Revolution Pi – Industrial PC Based on Raspberry Pi

#25

Post by [deleted] »

posguy wrote: post #21
learc83 wrote: post #6

This would have been perfect for my last startup. Keeping those damn Pi's running when they were deployed across the country was a nightmare. The SD cards had around a 20% failure rate per year. Eventually I just started shipping each system with a backup SD card taped to the inside of the case.

Were you using decent microSDs? Was each mSD getting QC'ed? We benchmark every single mSD before deploying an SBC with it, and have switched to only using Evo+ 32GB cards as they pass our QC 3/5 of the time, which is much better than the other available brands. Also, mSD corruption means your using a mSD card with a bad controller. The mSD was bound to corrupt and was a low caliber card to start with, unless you are…

[deleted]

Re: Revolution Pi – Industrial PC Based on Raspberry Pi

#26

Post by l1k »

fest wrote: post #23
l1k wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The I/O modules themselves have 2 pin headers with 14 pins each. The pin headers receive adapters with wire terminals. The adapters are included. The German I/O module page has an animation which shows this in detail, it seems the English page is missing that for some reason: https://revolution.kunbus.de/io-modul/

That's great. Are there any modules with support for camera and/or screen (HDMI/DSI) planned?

A mini HDMI port is on the top of the RevPi Core and you can attach any display that you would normally use on a Raspberry Pi. There are some displays available from 3rd parties which are suitable for mounting on top hat rails.

The CSI and DSI pins are not accessible on external ports I'm afraid. I'm also not aware of plans to add modules which would make CSI/DSI available externally. In theory it's possible to open the case and attach wires to the pins which go to a connector external to the case and you could connect a CSI camera or DSI display there, however the result can hardly be considered "industrial". :-)

An alternative is to connect a USB camera.

The 4-core BCM2837 on the Compute Module 3 is beefy enough for image processing with OpenCV, in fact we're using OpenCV for our demos at expos. It may even be sufficient for video transcoding. One thing to be aware of though is that we're using a kernel with RT patches. Which means low latency, but also lower throughput. If you don't need low latencies but maximum throughput, it may be a good idea to use a kernel without RT patches. All the tooling to build a custom kernel is on GitHub.

Re: Revolution Pi – Industrial PC Based on Raspberry Pi

#27

Post by ghvknvgvh »

learc83 wrote: post #6

This would have been perfect for my last startup. Keeping those damn Pi's running when they were deployed across the country was a nightmare. The SD cards had around a 20% failure rate per year. Eventually I just started shipping each system with a backup SD card taped to the inside of the case.

Mount the SD card read-only and it'll be fine forever. Speaking from experience.

Re: Revolution Pi – Industrial PC Based on Raspberry Pi

#28

Post by landswipe »

learc83 wrote: post #6

This would have been perfect for my last startup. Keeping those damn Pi's running when they were deployed across the country was a nightmare. The SD cards had around a 20% failure rate per year. Eventually I just started shipping each system with a backup SD card taped to the inside of the case.

Removable storage is problematic when it comes to reliability. Simply powering the device off while it is writing will cause issues, worse is when you have vibration momentarily overcoming the sprung contacts to the card.

Also mentioned by others are SLC industrial grade cards which have more stable flash memory technology, better controllers, wider operating temperatures and not to mention are much much faster. It all comes down to cost, but trying to build a reliable system with removable cards is not a good idea.

The Pi design team should consider adding some reasonable quality onboard eMMC memory in the future.

Regarding cards, I can vouch for http://www.atpinc.com which we use where I work, expensive but very reliable.

Re: Revolution Pi – Industrial PC Based on Raspberry Pi

#29

Post by strainer »

landswipe wrote: post #28
learc83 wrote: post #6

This would have been perfect for my last startup. Keeping those damn Pi's running when they were deployed across the country was a nightmare. The SD cards had around a 20% failure rate per year. Eventually I just started shipping each system with a backup SD card taped to the inside of the case.

Removable storage is problematic when it comes to reliability. Simply powering the device off while it is writing will cause issues, worse is when you have vibration momentarily overcoming the sprung contacts to the card. Also mentioned by others are SLC industrial grade cards which have more stable flash memory technology, better controllers, wider operating temperatures and not to mention are much much faster. It a…

"consider adding some reasonable quality onboard eMMC memory in the future."

The Pi "compute modules" include onboard eMMC and so do these which are based on them.

Re: Revolution Pi – Industrial PC Based on Raspberry Pi

#30

Post by yalue »

l1k wrote: post #13

Hi there. I'm an engineer on the Revolution Pi team. AMA.

On the website, you mentioned that you run stock Raspbian with a real-time patch on the devices. I'm mostly curious about the real-time extensions you're using. Did you write the patch in-house? What real-time capabilities are supported on it? Is it just a better scheduler, or do you also include things like locking protocols?

This isn't a particularly important question; I'm just a grad student in real-time research so I like learning about what gets used in practice. Thanks!

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