I have been working with my Raspberry Pi and the 3S CoDeSys soft Programmable Logic Controller Runtime image. Have found it incredibly easy to turn the RPi into an industrial controller. Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs) are used widely in heavy industry, municipal wastewater, HVAC systems and more (most PLCs cost hundreds or even thousands of dollars).
So far I’ve managed to use the PiFace as ultra cheap PLC I/O, and have controlled a Modbus/TCP (an industrial ethernet protocol) slave device.
The runtime allows you to easily create web-based Human / Machine interfaces for your controls.
If this sounds at all interesting I’d be more than willing to walk anyone through it, or perhaps it could be a topic for a build night?
I am also in the building automation and industrial automation business http://www.chipkin.com. We are able to get our firmware running on the Raspberry PI. (~140 industrial protocols, including BACnet IP, Modbus RTU/TCP, Veeder root, Danfoss, etc…)
We use a different box for production but we wanted to test to see if the Raspberry PI, etc… would make a good option for an industrial environment. Our onsite testing has not produce the best results and at this point we have abandoned the Raspberry PI for industrial environments.
Don’t even think about putting a RPi next to a VFD. The noise will restart the RPi in short order.
PiFace adds the RTC but the base board does not include a RTC. The clock will drift with temperature difference, If its not connected to a NTP server or the internet. I don’t know about you but I don’t put my controls network on the internet.
Random reboots even running hello world scripts. We had 10 RPi’s set up running various applications and scripts in a industrial environment and all of them restarted over 3 month period without any reason that I could determine. How many times has isvhsopen.com gone down?
Saying all of this, I use a Raspberry PI in my house to do my home automation. I have a scheduled restart and backup every week in-case the device dies and I don’t use it for any life safety system. The Raspbery PI is a great tool, I just wouldn’t be using it in a industrial or life safety environment.
I would love to talk more about this stuff. I have run a few of the home automation workshops at VHS before using the Raspberry PI. Mostly switching lights on and off or recording temperature to an online database.
Chipkin makes awesome products! Have and will always promote them because they are local, make things that work and work well, and because I know a really smart dude that works there
RPI is a fantastic platform to experiment and explore electronics and programming (and Linux) for a great price. I think with the availability of this CoDeSys runtime, it opens up some great possibilities to learn industrial programming on a portable language. As far as I know, CoDeSys is the only portable PLC language. Learn how to program on the Pi then take your code and implement on any controller supporting CoDeSys (ABB, Turck, Wago, Eaton, etc). Also, the development environment is free.
I love the idea that it can act as either a Modbus/TCP master or slave, but beyond being a great platform to learn and experiment with industrial programming and protocols, the runtime libraries also support the PiFace, I2C, OneWire, and PiCam, so it’s a bridge between industrial electronics, and microelectronics.
Some ideas for experiments…Build a remote sensor station for environmental monitoring as a Modbus/TCP slave, use a PLC to trigger the PiCam to take a pic, maybe even use the Pi as a master or slave test node…
