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Seeking the 5 Most Interesting, Amazing or Exciting Industrial Single Board Computer Applications

rscasny

Single Board computers (SBC) are amazing little devices in their own right. They pack a lot of technology in an incredibly small footprint. They are used for all kinds of projects by students, hobbyists and professionals. They have been used gaming, telecom, and other automation applications. They are also used to inspire and teach programming in schools. Over the last few years, I have seen more and more attention paid to using SBCs in industrial applications. I've learned "industrial" in this context means different things to different people. Sometimes it just means a commercial product (e.g., media player, vending machine). I define industrial in a truer sense of the world: in a factory, in a machine, or in the field for control of actuators, etc.

 

I'm looking to get 5 interesting industrial applications of SBCs. Do you have any in mind? If you do, leave a comment and tell me more.

 

Thanks.

 

Randall

--element14 team

  • I think a giant interactive touch screen kiosk could be a very interesting application for an SBC.

    Of course how interesting and exciting it is depends very heavily on how interesting and exciting the content is and how well the user interface has been thought out.

  • Hi Randall, I’ve used a number of SBCs over the years in railway applications, both on trains and at the trackside. None has had a HMI, the environment is too harsh really and ordinarily there’s not been a user to interact with, not directly at least, as most of my projects have been remote condition monitoring systems.

     

    More recently I’ve been involved in a signalling control application that uses compactPCI based SBCs networked together to provide both fault tolerance and separation of functionality across the SBCs, and also hardware in the loop test equipment.

     

    I’m not too sure what this year will bring, I’ve a couple of projects on that are more microcontroller sized so will have a custom board for those, nothing SBC in the pipeline just at the moment other than a microbit based data logging and telemetry system for some GreenPower electric racing cars, and although that’s quite a harsh environment I’m not sure that’s quite what you’re looking for.

     

    Hopefully the above will provide inspiration for others too!

     

    A

  • My favorite although possibly not quite "industrial" is the speeduino. It's a complete arduino based gasoline vehicle ECU replacement.

    https://speeduino.com/wiki/index.php/Speeduino


  • We used a RPi compute module for a central unit of an Access Control System. We developed a custom host board for it and it has different versions.

    Actuators are controlled using a microcontroller, which also is connected to an RFID reader. The microcontroller uses SPI to talk to the RPi. The RPi communicates to the server using a Giga Ethernet port for sending reports and downloading permissions data. There are versions with Servomotors and EM locks as actuators, both using direct control or through RS485.

    In a newest version, 2 main features were added to the RPi section of the device: Support for two cameras (CSI) and Bluetooth via serial using a nRF52. The application is a movement detection Bluetooth network which triggers the capturing of pictures, and from the existing access control events, recording is started as well.

     

    Several devices from the earlier version have been running for 5-6 years now and for the newer version, it could be something around 3 or 4 years.

  • in reply to clem57

    While I was at Garett Airresearch, our instrument room, was about 1 mile away from our test cells. If it rained, birds, etc. no signal. and we were using lasers.