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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

#31

Post by DannyBee »

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…

Sure, I'm not sure what industry/professional IOT really means, because it's too vague.

I agree the BLE/WIFI in the industrial space is a hilariosu mess, but Arduino is actually much worse at both - libraries like wifimulti_generic exist because there is no true standardized API that is useful enough, and wifi itself is fairly unreliable on lots of arduino devices - it's very easy to get them to crash just using the standard APIs.

I assume this is just arduino-in-din-rail format with other words on top. I would not say anything about "industry IOT" if i was them, nobody is going to use it in the industrial space.

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

#32

Post by DannyBee »

readenough wrote: post #14
numlock86 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I 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 missi…

That'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-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.

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

#33

Post by scoutt »

The 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.

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

#34

Post by the__alchemist »

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.

Yes, for small players at least. I've been refreshing Octopart for G4s and H7s (in certain footprints) for a year with no luck, other than scoring a few G4s for prototyping that soon went out of stock. I'm assuming larger players have access.

There are some variants/footprint combos you can get. For example, I've been able to get G431s for a while in the right footprint, which is similar to the one I'm looking for , but with less flash and ram. Or, I can can an H7 in a way-too-big footprint.

Other MCUs like Nordic and ESP went through the shortage with no unavailability. Not sure if STM's comparatively large product lineup (as opposed to there only being a handful of Nordic and ESP variants) played into this.

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

#35

Post by liminalsunset »

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…

I'm thinking (but can't confirm) that the intended market for these is companies that are too small to care about things like "well established vendors", where budgets are measured on the magnitude of hundreds of dollars and not thousands, and things are built from scrap or misc parts. I'm guessing that in some countries other than EU/Americas/etc, where things are done by "I know a guy that can figure it out", and people wearing safety sandals, this device would be convenient. I have reason to believe this market segment is both invisible and massive.

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.

I can see that things like these would be a good step up for those who were originally not even using PLCs. I think it provides a good "entry point" from Arduinos to something at least DIN rail mounted, and it's a way to experiment with ladder logic and whatnot. I personally would consider using it just for the convenience of that option.

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

#36

Post by colordrops »

scoutt wrote: post #33

The 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

Sounds like these candidates dodged a bullet.

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

#37

Post by marmetio »

colordrops wrote: post #36
scoutt wrote: post #33

The 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 Sounds like these candidates dodged a bullet.

> Now I use it

The qualification to work there and use an Arduino is to have no prior experience with it.

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

#38

Post by scoutt »

marmetio wrote: post #37
colordrops wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> one coworker, in interviews with candidates, always leaves the room as soon as the candidate mentions Arduino Sounds like these candidates dodged a bullet.

> Now I use it The qualification to work there and use an Arduino is to have no prior experience with it.

Yes! Also, I forgot to mention "in my lab at home".

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

#39

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

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..

A professional level device would have ESD protection, power filtering, and EMI controls. Something you'll never find on an Arduino product.

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

#40

Post by benj111 »

scoutt wrote: post #33

The 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,…

Is the maker market declining?

Raspi don't seem to have any trouble selling.

The problem for Arduino seems to be competition. I can get better boards cheaper. Arduino may have been the first, but they've since been surpassed.

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