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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

#51

Post by liminalsunset »

HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #45
liminalsunset wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 r…

I definitely see where you're coming from and I think these are valid points. In my personal experience though, there definitely does exist a market of "price insensitive, as long as it's under x". I think Arduino probably fits in there.

I feel like at least based on the quality of some boards vs clones that I have, there are definitely cases where I would have been "fired for not buying Arduino [IBM]" due to stuff like weird USB serial chips requiring driver hackery etc.

And I've definitely been in the situation where you tell someone it requires some part that costs "several hundreds of dollars" and they're like "oh no problem that's not an issue at all", because they were looking at the magnitude and not penny pinching.

I suppose that would be the market for this kind of thing. There's the other thing that you mention, where if you're using Arduino for this purpose, you might not be experienced enough to trust yourself to choose the right clone. Arduino provides sane defaults and generally the installations I've seen in the wild tended to use fairly close to "defaults".

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

#52

Post by thedingwing »

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 think this is discussed enough when PLCs are compared to other embedded systems (such as this product).

Through a PLC’s IDE, which is almost always proprietary software provided by the PLC manufacturer, a developer has the ability to view variable values, edit their values, “force” or “lock” a variable to a specific value (making assignments to that variable a no-op), and make edits to the code logic. This can all be done while maintaining the realtime guarantees of the system. These features (called “online editing” by PLC manufacturers) are essential in many applications where PLCs are used and are the biggest differentiator between a PLC and any other embedded system, such as Arduino’s products.

GDB-style debugging of a desktop program or JTAG/SWO debugging of a microcontroller can do some of what a PLC IDE can do, but it’s not as reliable and safe as PLC products.

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

#53

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

DannyBee wrote: post #32
readenough wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 try…

> 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.

Minor nitpick just because I want them to be credited properly. nRF is the product, nordic semiconductor is the company.

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

#54

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

liminalsunset wrote: post #48
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 t…

There are already arduino-based products that are suitable, but as stated before, a large part of the problem is getting past the "maker" association.

If you look at Industruino, Controllino, Ruggeduino products, and then the domain-specific arduino variants such as those for home automation, automotive hobbyist, lighting control, you'll probably find a lot of already OSH/OSS arduino-based hardware on the market.

And on the development side, ditch the (beginner-friendly?) Arduino IDE for VS Code and the PlatformIO plugin and you're all set.

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

#55

Post by the__alchemist »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #47
the__alchemist wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think the newer ones (8285, 32 pico D4 and V3) have onboard flash.

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

#56

Post by faxmeyourcode »

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…

Off topic, but this is the first time I've seen PLC mentioned on HN. Is there a well known path from transitioning from a normal style of "software engineering" job that isn't embedded focused, and into the PLC/industrial automation field? I have family working in chemical engineering plants and I think the machinery is badass. I feel like I would like a PLC job but I don't know where to begin.

From the other comments in the thread, I'm guessing starting on this new Arduino PLC might not be the best?

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

#57

Post by isatty »

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..

Atmel yes, idk about Arduino.

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

#60

Post by dmitrygr »

Who the hell writes this stuff and why can they not be bothered to get even the simple basics right?

> uses an STMicro STM32H747XI dual-core microcontroller,

> which includes a single high-performance Arm Cortex-M7

> core running at up to 480MHz and a lower-power Cortex-M4

> core running at up to 240MHz alongside a shared

> floating-point unit (FPU),

The cores do NOT share an FPU. The M7 core has a built-in FPU capable of single and double precision. The M4 core has its own FPU, capable of only single-precision.

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