I worry about this. It compromises the brand if they are willing to cheap out on automation hardware at this level. What else are they cheaping out on?
Point being there's almost absolutely no reason why they should have used a raspberry Pi in this environment. They have poor power management, EMI resilience, terrible enclosures as a rule and are somewhat prone to fucking out spontaneously with things like SD corruption. Your warranty and service options are basically the trash can. If a station goes down, what happens to your line? The entire cost-benefit analysis is probably wrong here. If it were me I'd buy one of the cheap Lenovo industrial mini PCs and get 5y NBD warranty, actually tested Ubuntu support, without all the other issues and buy an extra one.
They have the cash sitting around to do this properly.
Incidentally also none of this is really special. We were doing exactly this with recycled PC desktops 25 years ago running stuff in VB6 on windows NT on much larger and higher revenue and audit-heavy engineering lines.
The software is a separate issue. Buying that in is usually expensive and problem-ridden.
Point being there's almost absolutely no reason why they should have used a raspberry Pi in this environment. They have poor power management, EMI resilience, terrible enclosures as a rule and are somewhat prone to fucking out spontaneously with things like SD corruption. Your warranty and service options are basically the trash can. If a station goes down, what happens to your line? The entire cost-benefit analysis is probably wrong here. If it were me I'd buy one of the cheap Lenovo industrial mini PCs and get 5y NBD warranty, actually tested Ubuntu support, without all the other issues and buy an extra one.
They have the cash sitting around to do this properly.
Incidentally also none of this is really special. We were doing exactly this with recycled PC desktops 25 years ago running stuff in VB6 on windows NT on much larger and higher revenue and audit-heavy engineering lines.
The software is a separate issue. Buying that in is usually expensive and problem-ridden.