Strato Pi – An Industrial Raspberry Pi

https://www.sferalabs.cc/strato-pi/

by camtarn • 8 years ago

182 79 8 years ago

sferalabs.cc

dev_dull• 8 years ago

Hardware watchdog

I thought the broadcom chip provided a hw watchdog that's integrated directly into the linux kernel?

mlaretallack• 8 years ago

Its usual for an external watchdog to be added for industrial applications that cannot be disable ( or fail to be enabled) by firmware/software.

comboy• 8 years ago

Oh wow, thanks. I'm using rpis in my home automation and never knew about it. I've been using micros (mostly arduino) as watchdogs. This sounds so much better.

wigiv• 8 years ago

It's nice to see more options becoming available in this space. Industrial PCs (and, in the same vein, PLCs) from the old-guard industrial automation providers are generally lackluster for the cost, in my experience. So many acts of industrial automation and robotic system integration can be achieved with a Raspberry Pi and/or an Arduino, with a little hardening.

berbec• 8 years ago

I know I'm not the target market for their UPS addon, but is 91.00€ for a UPS board [1] that does not include the required lead-acid battery sound reasonable? I know they have gone through the certification process for everything, but doesn't this seem fairly high?

The battery is not lithium, but lead-acid. For an application using a Raspberry Pi, I generally assume size is a fairly major consideration. Considering a lead acid battery will need to be three times the size for similar charge capacity, doesn't this battery chemistry choice seem very strange?

A quick google brought me to the PiJuice HAT [2], a $54 piHAT, with an included 1820mAH LiPo. This device also doesn't massively increase the size of the Pi. PiJuice claims "~4 to 6 hours in constant use". Let us assume this is a vastly inflated figure designed by the marketing department. Isn't 2 hours run time more than enough for a UPS? If the power failure is longer, I want my UPS to allow me to safely shut down my gear.

1: https://www.sferalabs.cc/product/strato-pi-ups-board/ 2: https://ameridroid.com/products/pijuice-hat-1

FullyFunctional• 8 years ago

LiPo is a really terrible choice for a UPS; it'll wear out quite quickly. LiFo is way better, like this: https://www.crowdsupply.com/silicognition/lifepo4wered-pi-pl...

snovv_crash2• 8 years ago

LiFePO4 is also much more fire resistant due to punctures, shocks and overcharging, which is also good for an industrial setting.

pavs• 8 years ago

Litium battery backup and UPS is two different things.

gsich4• 8 years ago

Lead batteries are cheap.

falcolas• 8 years ago

And reliable, and they're OK with being cycled frequently. Their failure mode also doesn't include the words "chemical fire".

dsl• 8 years ago

It is awesome to see battery backup being added to the Pi. There aren't any good solutions currently short of a full on UPS or a consumer grade battery pack.

ynezz• 8 years ago

http://www.mini-box.com/site/ComparisonChart-UPS.htm

Havoc• 8 years ago

Well given that the raspberry is decidedly consumer grade too I don't see an issue with running it off a name brand powerbank.

bonzini3• 8 years ago

AdaFruit's "Powerboost 1000 charger" is not cheap but it's very good and also has USB power pass-through pin, in order to detect power failures. However you will need a 5V-3.3V level converter to feed it to the RPi's GPIO pins.

plumeria3• 8 years ago

Another option worth considering is the Modberry: https://modberry.techbase.eu/

tomcam• 8 years ago

heinrichhartman• 8 years ago

Indeed. WTF?

plumeria3• 8 years ago

Well, we ended up quoting a custom build with them, and it was slightly cheaper than the Strato Pi. I agree that pricing information for standard configurations should be available.

nimbius• 8 years ago

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.

Tomte• 8 years ago

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).

52-6F-62• 8 years ago

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.

camtarn2• 8 years ago

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.

bonzini3• 8 years ago

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).

madengr• 8 years ago

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.

rsync2• 8 years ago

"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.

donjoe• 8 years ago

... 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 ;)

bildung• 8 years ago

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.

phkahler• 8 years ago

> 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

plumeria3• 8 years ago

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

joshvm2• 8 years ago

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.

jjeaff• 8 years ago

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.

ranit• 8 years ago

> 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. :-)

kehrlann• 8 years ago

I've had numerous failures on older RPi models due to SD card corruption, even in non-write intensive contexts. Not sure this is good enough when you want reliability...

TickleSteve2• 8 years ago

Thats a well known issue with standard distributions, and there are fairly well known ways around it...

Basically, don't do continuous writing to the card, turn off atime updates,possibly even work entirely from the initrd if possible. Also, use proper industrial sd cards, these have proper wear-levelling and bad-block management unlike the consumer cards.

In other words, treat it as an embedded system and tailor it to your use-case.

anfractuosity• 8 years ago

atime refers to timestamping of files with their access time right?

That sounds interesting re. turning off atime updates, how do you do that out of interest?

sgt6• 8 years ago

I've tried all these "ways around it", but SD card corruption still happens on Raspberry Pi's. We use them as dashboards around the office so having them running 24/7 really tests these devices.

I've found that the only working recipe for a stable Raspberry Pi is a USB hard drive (prefer SSD but mechanical also fine), and a UPS.

My simple advice is: do not try to run Raspberry Pi from SD cards in "production" under any circumstances on a large scale, as you will run into filesystem corruption and create a lot of work for yourself.

sorenjan• 8 years ago

I'm pretty sure my Pi failures where due to weak power supplies. I tried running a Raspberry Pi 1 B on a 1 A power supply, and after a few months it wouldn't boot. Since then I've switched to a bigger SD card (16 GB) for better wear leveling, and a 2,5 A power supply and haven't had any issues yet.

sgt6• 8 years ago

It's often a combination of the power supply and the type of SD cards, but eventually you will have a failure no matter what SD card you use. I've learned this the hard way from running dozens of Pi's 24/7. Looking back, I regret the decision to use Raspberry Pi. See my comment below.

pmontra• 8 years ago

A feature I didn't see anywhere is the ability to start the PI at a given time or after receiving a wake on LAN packet. This would be useful in several scenarios like performing some task, shutdown and boot again later, maybe at a time programmed by the PI itself.

Doxin• 8 years ago

a RPI uses so little power that it makes no sense to do wake-on-lan, and indeed the RPI doesn't support wake on lan at all. Just leave it on and idle.

tossaway44• 8 years ago

The other day I saw someone commenting on aMLC SD cards and their increased tolerance to sudden power loss and generally rougher conditions. Can’t find it, though. Anyone have a link?

Fnoord2• 8 years ago

I wrote about this in the past various times. For example here [1]. I learned about it from HN as well though.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18275494

snops• 8 years ago

The big problem with using the raspberry pi in industrial applications is the single source and short production lifespan gauruntee (6 years [1]) making maintainance or long term production difficult. Industrial machines (e.g. printing presses) will easily last decades, and you often hear of problems finding suitable replacement electronics for them, so basing your control system on a single sourced component is a bit dangerous.

Other single board computers or system on module offer 10 year production lifetimes from introduction, e.g Variscite. This is possible as the manufacturer of the SoC (generally NXP or TI) also gauruntee to produce the silicon for 10 years, and as (unlike Broadcom) they will sell to anyone, alternative boards are available with the same processor should one board manufacturer go bust. They are a bit more expensive, but a trivial percent of the overall cost for an industrial application, and the difference isn't that much once you add a case, protection, industrial power supply etc.

1. https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=193995.

DrNuke• 8 years ago

These customised Pi packages are hit and miss indeed but you can very often find a pretty neat plug-and-play solution for your particular problem that saves you time, so paying $150 instead of $75 is great ROI for your business.

antpls• 8 years ago

Could this be used for space projects, like satellites? (Thinking about the name)

pas• 8 years ago

The rPi chip itself is not rad-hardened, so it'd require a bulky shielding, that'd increase the launch mass, which is a lot more expensive than a more space suited chip. Also, launching into space requires a lot better electronics. Sure, it'd work likely, but .. when a launch is that expensive, you wouldn't accept these risks.

camtarn2• 8 years ago

As an example of how we might consider using these:

We work on a lot of short-lived one-off experimental projects, and we currently use B&R industrial controllers for more or less everything. However, these use a clunky Windows-only development environment and can only be programmed in C/C++. For some projects - e.g. putting a data logger in a low voltage electrical cabinet, which interfaces to some gear using serial/modbus/CAN and analog/digital I/O and uploads the results to the cloud - this could potentially be quite useful. We don't often work on safety-critical systems, or require 5-nines uptime.

The only thing is that this system isn't that cheap compared to B&R gear, although not having to pay a subscription for the dev environment helps.

halbritt• 8 years ago

I've been testing this one from Balena (formerly Resin)

https://www.balena.io/fin/

It's a carrier for the Raspberry Pi compute module. Solves many of the problems it has in an industrial environment. It takes 6-24vdc, has real eMMC storage, an RTC, a hardware coprocessor that can be used as a watchdog and an mPCIE. I think there's a DIN case for it as well.

All that for a bit over a hundred dollars plus the $40 for the compute module. That seems pretty decent at that price. The next step up seems to be a "cheap" x86 IPC at a few hundred dollars.

syntaxing• 8 years ago

I can see specific usage of these but probably not large scale usage. Industrial things need to work 100% of the time and has to easily talk to other devices reliably usually in the form of some redudant network. It'll be pretty hard to convince engineers to use these on industrial equipment. The early 2010s were extremely lack luster for industrial electronics technological advancement. Everything you used were ancient (development of them started probably before I was born). But the mass adoption of Ethernet/ethercat have been speeding things up.

mdturnerphys• 8 years ago

I've been using the PLCs from UniPi [0] for a few months. They started with Raspberry-Pi-based systems but now have a Allwinner-H5-based system with built in memory. They have a significant number of digital and analog ports, depending on the model, and work with a number of different programming solutions.

[0] https://www.unipi.technology/

qwerty456127• 8 years ago

Cool but is there something similar yet less expensive for not-really-industrial usage? Built-in UPS and hardware watchdog seem really valuable for almost everybody.

Strato Pi – An Industrial Raspberry Pi

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