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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

#81

Post by duskwuff »

dmitrygr wrote: post #60

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 capab…

Wouldn't be the first time that Arduino got basic product specs wrong. They're still advertising the Vidor 4000 [1] as supporting "Mini PCI Express [...] for connecting your FPGA as a peripheral to a computer or to creat [sic] your own PCI interfaces" -- on an FPGA that lacks PCIe support.

[1]: https://store.arduino.cc/products/arduino-mkr-vidor-4000

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

#83

Post by duskwuff »

benj111 wrote: post #40
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.

> Is the maker market declining?

No, but it's not a huge growth market either. Makers tend to prefer products which are relatively inexpensive and close to "raw" hardware; neither of these factors are particularly favorable to manufacturers.

> Raspi don't seem to have any trouble selling.

Ironically, a lot of this is because it's become popular for use as an embedded Linux controller, often for applications that the BCM283x isn't even particularly well suited for. It's used in a number of musical synthesizers, for example.

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

#84

Post by numpad0 »

Is "brand loyalty" actually a thing? Personally I lean towards a thinking that product loyalty likely exist but the brand is just an aesthetic.

To me, this one looks like a Starbucks branded coffee maker, or a Toyota branded bicycle, a company swag product line that are not what the brand represents but do technically belong to the similar extremely generalized categories.

And, this won't take genius to figure out, so the real question is, why it's kept being done? This only erode a brand and plant doubts on corporate integrity into customer's minds.

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

#85

Post by numpad0 »

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 see multiple comments recommending random Chinese PLC device from Aliexpress over this one. Where is the reputation and brand recognition of Arduino positively affecting anything here?

It also seems to me that your definition of the word "reliability" isn't agreeing well with others - to me it seems that these industry guys are using the word along "semi believable certification documents and soft established likelihood of not catching fire" whereas yours are more along "blind idolization for moral qualities seen in individual corporate employees". That might need a fix.

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

#86

Post by IshKebab »

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..

Arduino has a terrible reputation for hardware and software from a professional, reliable point of view.

It's fine from a easy, hacked together hobby project point of view, but that's an entirely different thing.

It's like Python vs Rust. I wouldn't introduce a beginner to programming with Rust, but I also wouldn't program my manufacturing line (or whatever) with Python.

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

#87

Post by duskwuff »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #66
liminalsunset wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 l…

You may have run into a counterfeit FTDI chip, then. The normal $5 arduino clones from reputable manufacturers often have genuine chips. The $2-3 ones are trouble.

Most of the clones have stopped even using the FTDI knockoffs nowadays. There are alternative USB-to-serial chips from other manufacturers, like the CH340 series, that work very well.

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

#88

Post by readenough »

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…

You're right. I should not have judged like that and I apologize. What I should have said is that I have seen a lot of misplaced skepticism in this industry and I never really understood it. There is plenty of room for Arduino to enter this market and develop good products. We'll see what happens.

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

#89

Post by numlock86 »

mbanzi wrote: post #20
numlock86 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The STM32 series don't have any BLE/WiFi solutions built in yet. Since it's "Arduino" I assume it's a NINA module or similar from u-blox as a "co-processor" over UART with an AT command interface, which is basically a brandlabeled ESP32 with some firmware enhancements they already use on other products that focus on IoT.

it's not an ESP32 it's an high quality Murata/Cypress module this is the datasheet https://content.arduino.cc/assets/Arduino-Portenta-H7_Datash...

Good to know, so it's something to avoid. I had to deal with a lot of the wireless modules from Infineon and let's just say the support was ... hm, I guess terrible would be a pretty mild term in that regard.

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

#90

Post by idiotsecant »

PaulWaldman wrote: post #46
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.

>Siemens S7 PLCs

>Real PLCs

I don't think we're talking about the same thing!

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