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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

#41

Post by scoutt »

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.

She is the sweetest person in the world, and always come back like after 5 seconds. It's a joke :)

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

#42

Post by uoaei »

liminalsunset wrote: post #35
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 p…

I've watched someone in my social circle building a company around pre- and post-workout snacks and your line

> even a really hacked together setup can work surprisingly well

Is exactly right. Now that they got those three machines working, efforts go mostly into marketing, not into engineering.

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

#43

Post by gw98 »

liminalsunset wrote: post #35
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 p…

That market is already covered by the cheap dev boards, arduino clones and Chinese PLCs at considerably less cost than the officially branded parts.

You can't even buy an Arduino Uno for the price these guys are selling PLCs for: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005004887420307.html

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

#44

Post by usrusr »

gw98 wrote: post #27
usrusr wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

“The industry" isn't a single uniform group. Sure, people who spent their career procuring industrial controllers won't look at Arduino even once when they introduce a non-maker form factor, and chances are they wouldn't be impressed if they did. But I can easily imagine that there's an underserved space between the extremes of the maker juggling dev-boards not really intended for him and the career specialist who goes to all the right trade shows. Some company for example that has barely enough controller needs to set aside full time staff for that, but does not want to outsource either.

It's possible that Arduino fantasizes about taking over large fractions of the industrial PLC market and if that's the case I'll chuckle agreeingly with everybody ridiculing them, but I believe that there could far more reasonable and realistic opportunities for them to stretch a little in that direction.

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

#45

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

liminalsunset wrote: post #35
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 p…

> I can see that things like these would be a good step up for those who were originally not even using PLCs

I agree that that's what Arduino thinks the market is, but I disagree that their conceptual market will buy this.

Arduino-branded hardware is typically 5x the cost of the clones (remember, it's OSH) at no noticeable improvement in quality. DIN-rail mountable arduino clones and modules with I/O isolation that run on 24V power already exist at very reasonable price points, and from reputable dealers such as Automation Direct. I've used ruggedized modules such as Industruino (although their prices have definitely gone upmarket) and they're nice. IME, the only people who buy actual Arduino hardware are either beginners who don't realize that the much less expensive clones are every bit as good, or business buyers who don't really care, because it's not their money.

But maybe I'm wrong and there's enough of a price-insensitive market to make this a success. I certainly hope so. I'm a freelancer, so the bigger the market, the better for me :-)

I have designed & built an arduino clone-based product that mounts on DIN rail because the hardware it communicates with also does. Multiple installations running large machine control applications without a hitch. The clones are fine.

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

#46

Post by PaulWaldman »

idiotsecant wrote: post #24

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 th…

I don't know about that. Siemens S7 PLCs are not capable of online edits and they have a massive install base.

In the Rockwell / Allen-Bradley world, almost all PLCs support online edits.

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

#47

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

the__alchemist wrote: post #34
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 ,…

Espressif has an advantage that they don't have on board flash. That boosts yield and volume per wafer. At this point I won't be doing new designs with STM32 because ST can't deliver.

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

#48

Post by liminalsunset »

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 there any pathway to creating something that's like Arduino but suitable for professional use? The primary benefits of such a solution would be 1) Freely reuse code and open source ecosystem 2)"Professional Grade" technical viability and reliability, and it would be suitable for people who want to handle support by themselves and do not want to pay the entry price for professional software and tooling.

Right now there's a lot of new IoT devices being put on the market and a large number of them are undoubtedly based on Arduino, but of course, there are supposed reliability and code issues with it.

However, people write and open source so much drivers and example code for Arduino. Wouldn't it be nice if the Arduino platform could become "production ready" so that people can actually leverage these drivers and example codes in their own projects instead of having to rewrite drivers for every combination of MCU and peripherals?

Ideally, making a product with Arduino shouldn't be a derogatory statement about its quality.

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

#49

Post by PaulWaldman »

In the last 10 years the cost of small PLCs have plummeted. This is obviously a play to get users to buy into an ecosystem. You can buy one of these with a small amount of I/O for $1k. It includes a local distributor who will show up to your door and help you spec out equipment as well.

The largest cost is the plant support techs who can troubleshoot and potentially modify PLC code. Many plants rely on electricians for this role. Electricians who can nearly follow ladder logic, which is modeled after wiring schematics.

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

#50

Post by samtho »

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).

I blame this on the implicit demands of the industrial markets endless fascination on the Raspberry Pi “platform” which has made actually getting your hands on one very difficult. Arduino is trying to also satisfy this market by offering a more targeted/discrete solution rather than a full Linux system. I think where they are misguided is that there are these sort of PLCs available at a lower cost today and people opt for the Raspberry Pi precisely for the flexibility afforded to them by a full Linux system.
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