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SIMATIC IOT2020 – the educational intelligent gateway for industrial IoT solutions

There has been a need for a long time for a way to take the Student, Maker or Design Engineer to the next level, from developing a product on Arduino UNO, Yun, Mega, Raspberry PI or other embedded platforms that are not certified for Industrial or Commercial use (CE and UL mark of approval for instance) and migrate the design easily to an approved product.

Something that allows the code and hardware platform to move to an approved platform, preferably with little change to the design of hardware IO or software and with little or no requirement for additional approvals.

Where the core hardware is already CE and UL approved, where the packaging is ready to go in an industrial or commercial environment and so will integrate easily with other industrial hardware and software platforms but still remain open and very low cost to implement.

By 2020 there will be more than 10 billion devices connected to the internet, we need an easy solution and we need it now if we want to be a part of that.

So what do we need

Arduino Compatablility, after all it is the most famous prototyping platform for creating interactive electronic solutions

Linux Compatability, considering the popularity of the Raspberry PI and Beagle Bone black to name just a couple

Industrial Form Factor for power and mounting, so 24V nominal supply, Din Rail mounting standard, Industrial Enclosure.

Well now there is one...

On Friday 14th October at the Rome maker Faire RS-Components, Siemens, and Arduino's Massimo Banzi presentd the easiest way to start with IIoT (Industrial Internet of Things)

Siemens and RS joined forces to bring a new Industrial IoT device to the market, which will support engineers, makers, and designers of the future.

Based on the Intel Quark x1000, it sports 

  • 512MB RAM and an SD Card holder for upto 32GB uSD card for OS and applications
  • 1 x Ethernet port for internet or intranet connectivity
  • 1 USB Host port, 1 USB Client port
  • 1 TTL Serial Port / Console for Linux
  • Real Time Clock with optional battery back-up
  • Proven SIMATIC quality with high level of robustness
  • Yocto Linux and Arduino IDE support (compile and run sketches with little to no changes)
  • Easily expandable with Arduino shields and mini PCIe cards
  • Compact industrial design and DIN rail mounting
  • programming in popular languages like C++, Python, Java etc.
  • Can run Node-Red, MQTT, SQLite3 so an easy to use graphical flow design tool available from day one.

I was not fortunate enough to be at the Faire but I did provide a video with my initial thought and views of the platform and I have had the secretive pleasure of getting to know the IoT2020 for the last few weeks and am very impressed with its capabilities, even though I was using engineer samples and early software, It was not too much of a challange to get to try all of its features and I was able to put together a working demonstration

 

 

With a background in Industrial Electronics, Solutions Architecture and programming, I now spend my time working on my YouTube channel ( https://www.youtube.com/thebreadboardca ) where I create educational videos showing how to use various devices including Test and measurement, Home and industrial Automation, Components and other fun things I am sent to review or include in projects. I will also create many projects to showcase the use of these items
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