Comment by nimbius | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nimbius | Hacker News Reader

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Ive worked in industrial manufacturing before, and I presently work as an engine mechanic in a small chain of midwestern diesel repair stores. I use regular raspberry pi's to pull data from ECU/OBD systems, and I even store that data on a PI server as part of a customers work ticket data.

the problem with anything thats 'industrialized' is that so many companies use this as a chance to gin up the price and double down on rent-seeking behavior. This thing takes a $45 pi and jacks the price up to $250USD. Some of the goofier features include:

- on-board buzzer. You know, because over the constant din of lathe, shave, and heat treat assembly line systems you're surely going to pay attention to the buzzer from something the size of a pack of smokes. anything essential should be shown on the light tower or picked up by QA.

- standard RS-232 and RS-485 interfaces to the Raspberry Pi serial line, with opto-isolator and electrostatic discharge protection: Motoman, Fanuc, Mitsubishi, and almost every other automation hardware have used cat5 for a decade. doesnt the pi have grounded cat5?

CAN network support - god no. This jumps into the realm of medical systems, elevator controls, and passenger vehicles. all of these are made of intrinsically isolated circuits and go through some of the most rigorous testing imaginable. For example, RF leakage common in a PI could cause aberrant failures or signaling problems in robotics that arent expecting it. CAN type controllers can withstand shock/heat/humidity many times that of what a normal computer can handle. Introducing the PI as a CAN device is asking for grievous bodily harm as a service.

On the pricing front. I've designed systems which use the RPi as a base and are sold for several hundred pounds (spectrometers).

The reason is basically margin and not going out of business. If you want to make any money, you need to sell at around 3x your BOM cost to compensate for distribution, optional sales events, labour, amortised certification costs and so on.

Working backwards, $250 means about $85 in parts. A custom printed DIN rail case probably costs $15-20 in small volume, the Pi is $45 and that only leaves $20 or so for the PCB and components which seems easy enough if they've over-specced it for industry. I wouldn't be surprised if this thing costs $100 to build; not including labour, packaging and shipping.

This is a classic "I'm an engineer and could build this for 1/3 the price" - sure you could. But you couldn't sell it that cheaply and make a business out of it.

Doesn't sound like he's saying that. Sounds like he is saying the $35 model will work just fine. And it is already proven and produced on a mass scale.

This is an extension kit to a well designed and well adopted embedded system. The OPs complaints to me read as: nobody wants these features because the stock model works for OP, and that the price was jacked up to cater to an industrial market. I addressed the second point above - to stay in business, hardware costs money.

On the first point, the product definitely provides benefits over the stock Pi. If you need those improvements, you need them. The $35 model will die if you plug in a logic level that isn't 3V3. It certainly won't handle standard RS-232. It doesn't have a proper power jack - either USB Micro or two GPIO pins (no latching). It also doesn't come with a DIN rail mounting system, nor an RTC, nor a UPS, nor a good voltage regulator. Some people might want those features (I've worked jobs where they would have been useful.)

Also on the buzzer front - not all DIN boxes are in factories. They're used inside buildings for power distribution and fuses, in greenhouses to control irrigation systems. These aren't necessarily noisy environments.

Those industrial Pis offer things that are absoklutely important to many industrial users. Maybe not for you, but they have their market: DIN rail mounting, I/O modules, ESD/EMI lab results, conformance to electrical standards etc. pp.

Another one, probably better known is the Revolution Pi (https://revolution.kunbus.de).

"CAN network support - god no. This jumps into the realm of medical systems, elevator controls, and passenger vehicles."

When I see "CAN network support" I am not thinking of controlling those systems, but rather, having the ability to read those systems ... or in the case of a device like a VAG-COM, being able to set new values, etc.

I agree that I would not want amateur tie-ins to critical safety systems like elevators and bridges.

... just wait for the first dude sniffing in active mode by forgetting to set the passive flag. The can controller will then not actively compose messages but will set the ACK bit... God knows what might happen by a third party ACK'ing on the bus ;)

I design electronics which uses CAN internally. This would be super useful to put in a test jig.

I fully appreciate the applications you listed as rendering the pi insufficient.

I can however see potential use cases in industrial film and television lighting where controllers were often 100% proprietary and vastly more expensive and you’d generally have a large array of them on large productions.

This isn’t a life or death scenario and these are cheap enough to have a spare or two on hand that could likely be compiled and written inside of an hour or two and connected within minutes.

And as another user mentioned, brings the units up to electrical safety standards in such environments.

It wasn’t my field so I don’t know for sure, but it seems like it could be useful.

>> CAN network support - god no. This jumps into the realm of medical systems, elevator controls, and passenger vehicles.

In the auto industry nobody is going to use this as a component on a car. We will use it for software development to communicate with a module in development. Someone may use it in end of line test equipment. For those purposes $250 is rather cheap. I was hoping it would have a LIN interface, but oh well.

Speaking of LIN, has anyone used the sllin driver on the RPi?

https://github.com/trainman419/linux-lin/tree/master/sllin

The carino has a LIN bus: http://carino.io/

>> the problem with anything thats 'industrialized' is that so many companies use this as a chance to gin up the price and double down on rent-seeking behavior. This thing takes a $45 pi and jacks the price up to $250USD.

Fair point, but is it really a "problem"? Think of it from the opposite side. A market for this markup exists. It is an opportunity for people like you, that understand well both, a particular (non computer) domain and computing that is needed to support it.

I bet many "diesel repair stores" would need what you already accomplished with your regular raspberry pi's custom applications. And won't mind to get it packaged with an useful hardware and software for whatever markup you deem fair. They will be glad to pay for what you already thought and successfully incorporated in your application, wouldn't they?

It is HN after all. :-)

Both CAN bus and RS-232 still are very common interfaces in industrial manufacturing. It makes perfect sense to provide them as it makes piecewise upgrades of machinery possible.

As a counter-example for RS-485, my solar roof's data logger consists of an RS-485 to USB converter, a Raspberry Pi and some solid-state relays. They even used the standard Raspberry Pi power supply, but they cut off the micro-USB and use screw terminals connected to the Pi's GPIO (probably so that customers do not have the temptation to swap it with a random phone charger they bought on eBay).

As a counterexample, we used a CAN interface on a battery charger to get various metrics about the battery. Not all CAN usage is safety critical.

I’d think using flash memory for the file system on an industrial controller is another big problem. I had nothing but crashes with an RPI due to filesytem issues. Flash memory was intended for bulk R/W, not random access.

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