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Arduino unveils the Opta – “Micro PLC” for industrial IoT

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Re: Arduino unveils the Opta – “Micro PLC” for industrial IoT

#21

Post by mbanzi »

gw98 wrote: post #18

I 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-wel…

Arduino 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..

Re: Arduino unveils the Opta – “Micro PLC” for industrial IoT

#22

Post by westmeal »

mbanzi wrote: post #17
spyremeown wrote: post #15

Arduino, 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).

Hi 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 hel…

It's OK I still love you guys. Admittedly I'm a hobbyist though.

Re: Arduino unveils the Opta – “Micro PLC” for industrial IoT

#23

Post by gw98 »

mbanzi wrote: post #21
gw98 wrote: post #18

I 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-wel…

Arduino 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..

No 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.

Re: Arduino unveils the Opta – “Micro PLC” for industrial IoT

#24

Post by idiotsecant »

The 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.

Re: Arduino unveils the Opta – “Micro PLC” for industrial IoT

#25

Post by Dec25IsOct31 »

numlock86 wrote: post #5
DannyBee wrote: post #3

I 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…

The 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 autom…

Talking about Portenta, to be fair, Massimo and Arduino people IMO have done a pretty good job at characterising the product as "useful for something not extremely complex under the control/automation/engineering requirements PoV but where expanded IoT possibilities can be a huge selling point, and especially useful for systems which are serially produced". So, no process control or huge machinery, think more like mid-size ovens [https://www.arduino.cc/pro/case-studies-rinaldi-ovens] or things like this. I think the Arduino people are being very aware of the industry needs and are not being unrealistic "wahh PLCs sux lets throw them all away" kind of people ( :D ).

As for me, as an industrial controls professional, I welcome these new solutions, they're another tool in my toolbox. It's up to my engineering decision to evaluate the proper usage of tools.

Re: Arduino unveils the Opta – “Micro PLC” for industrial IoT

#26

Post by usrusr »

gw98 wrote: post #23
mbanzi wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Arduino 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..

No 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…

True or not, "reliability bordering on childproof" can be a compelling sales pitch. And reputation is bound by recall, of whuch Arduino has plenty: brand X might have the best reputation imaginable amongst those in the know, but if you aren't in the know and you haven't ever heard of X all that reputation won't affect you. For all you know, X could be terrible. If there's another brand Y you have heard of, and only half of what you heard was negative, brand Y has at least some reputation (the non-negative half) positively affecting you.

That's the basic mechanism of why so much advertisement is just about brand awareness, not talking about quality at all: "I've heard a lot about them, and not everything has been bad" is less bad than "never heard about them, even if they were really terrible I wouldn't know"

Re: Arduino unveils the Opta – “Micro PLC” for industrial IoT

#27

Post by gw98 »

usrusr wrote: post #26
gw98 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No 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…

True or not, "reliability bordering on childproof" can be a compelling sales pitch. And reputation is bound by recall, of whuch Arduino has plenty: brand X might have the best reputation imaginable amongst those in the know, but if you aren't in the know and you haven't ever heard of X all that reputation won't affect you. For all you know, X could be terrible. If there's another brand Y you have heard of, and only h…

I don't think you understand the industry. Reliability is qualified through testing, certification and support. It isn't a function of marketing.

Marketing gets you to the testing table. But better not have any skeletons in the cupboard.

Edit: I suspect you're confusing engineering for the niche sector of makers, the latter of which are driven by fads and marketing (sorry if I piss anyone off there).

Re: Arduino unveils the Opta – “Micro PLC” for industrial IoT

#28

Post by pclmulqdq »

usrusr wrote: post #26
gw98 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No 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…

True or not, "reliability bordering on childproof" can be a compelling sales pitch. And reputation is bound by recall, of whuch Arduino has plenty: brand X might have the best reputation imaginable amongst those in the know, but if you aren't in the know and you haven't ever heard of X all that reputation won't affect you. For all you know, X could be terrible. If there's another brand Y you have heard of, and only h…

Arduino is a marketing company that makes amateurish overpriced dev kits and sells them to amateurs. They have that market largely thanks to marketing moves.

Arduino products rarely sell to people who do any form of QC or comparison shopping - they sell to people who buy the first thing on their mind.

Most of the Chinese embedded companies are engineering groups that understand they are filling the low end of the professional cost-quality curve, but they are still on that curve. For what you pay, they make a great product.

Re: Arduino unveils the Opta – “Micro PLC” for industrial IoT

#29

Post by fps-hero »

numlock86 wrote: post #16
gaudat wrote: post #7

Is 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.

> 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 a…

Based 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.

Re: Arduino unveils the Opta – “Micro PLC” for industrial IoT

#30

Post by FACTS_AdamC »

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #13
DannyBee wrote: post #3

I 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…

An amazing amount of work is being done, apparently: From this LinkedIn post [1], they say: > It will soon add PLC IEC 61131-3 programming (full set of 5 languages) + no/code fieldbus + Arduino sketch integrated with shared variables. There will be a new Arduino PLC IDE for that. I also do a lot of PLC work. I agree that this isn't going to replace my CompactLogix, S7-1500, or Beckhoff controllers...ever. But there a…

Lead engineer for P1AM here. You're definitely right P1AM is not going to replace every PLC around. We've seen several applications, like you've mentioned, where it's used as a supplement to a traditional PLC. We've also seen many customers start to use it as their go to device in their systems. It's all about giving people flexibility in their options.

P1AM does support ladder (and the other IEC languages) through OpenPLC(https://openplcproject.com/). This is great if you want a blend of IEC languages as ProductivitySuite only does ladder. On the other hand, if someone decides the P1AM isn't the right fit, it's easy to pop in a P1-540 and go the traditional PLC route without having to completely redo the physical system since it's all the same IO.

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