Demystifying the Raspberry Pi Industrial Computer

The Raspberry Pi has moved from the makerspace to the industrial IoT edge. For this episode of OnLogic Live, we spoke with OnLogic Product Manager, Mike Walsh, and Travis Cox, Chief Technology Evangelist at Inductive Automation, to help shed some light on why Raspberry Pi is now a viable option for industrial projects. 

For one thing, the Raspberry Pi platform offers an impressively high capabilities to cost ratio, and that its compact size enables it to fit just about anywhere. But it takes more than that to be a good choice for your next industrial deployment. That’s where the Factor 200 Series of industrial Raspberry Pi computers comes in. Watch the broadcast or read the recap below to learn more including: 

• What makes an industrial Raspberry Pi industrial 
• Why an industrial Raspberry Pi is so appealing for many use cases
• How an industrial Raspberry Pi can be used in an Ignition environment

Watch the video: Industrial Raspberry Pi, Why now?

Introducing our speakers

Mike Walsh: I’m a senior product manager here at OnLogic. And for those who aren’t familiar with OnLogic, we do computers for tough use cases out at the edge. We’ll talk today about industrial manufacturing strategy, but, we’re also seeing applications in smart cities, smart buildings, smart agriculture and more. It’s really about getting intelligence and computers out to the edge.

Travis Cox: I’m the Chief Technology Evangelist for Inductive Automation. We are a software company and we provide an industrial application platform called Ignition to build any kind of industrial application.

What led OnLogic to develop the Factor Series – a Raspberry Pi industrial computer?

Mike: It’s all about the edge where so much is happening. We’re at this amazing tipping point where data is becoming more and more valuable and the cost of acquiring that data is coming down. It’s completely changing industries. When we created the Factor Series using ARM, we were able to hit that low cost parameter and also low power consumption. 

We wanted to ensure that our customers could put these computers almost anywhere. So we industrialized them and made them able to survive in tough environments that might include dust, dirt, humidity, temperature extremes, as well as vibration and impact forces. 

Its capabilities to cost ratio is just off the hook and it’s small enough to put nearly anywhere. That really opens up many opportunities to collect data and get value out of that data. I’m really excited to offer two special versions of our Factor Series which are preloaded, ready to go with Ignition Edge: the IGN800 and the IGN802.

The Ignition community and Raspberry Pi

Travis: Our customers are trying to solve the challenges of getting access to data and bringing it up to their applications. From even our very beginning, we’ve been helping customers with hub and spoke architectures. That’s where you put those spokes out there to do local data collection and do a store and forward and potentially also have a local HMI on critical assets. 

So to start, they’re trying to get these proof of concepts (POCs) out there and Raspberry Pis were just so easy to get a hold of to try it out. And they worked to solve the problems. But then moving from PoCs to actual production, there’s the realization that you need a more reliable and ruggedized solution. They need the right hardware for the right solution. 

Bridging the gap from the proof of concept makerspace to industrial hardware

Mike: The Factor Series is an Industrial Raspberry Pi and it is our first foray into ARM technology. As Travis mentioned, a lot of people were already using Raspberry Pi for their PoCs. A lot of our engineers also use them at home for home automation. 

In fact, our engineering team was pretty excited to work on this project. Anytime you can get an engineering department excited, it means you’re probably going to get a pretty doggone good product out of it. 

Raspberry Pi – the partner 

In addition, the market position of Raspberry Pi was really important. They are a super great company with well-established hardware, great user base, and amazing community support. So, we were thrilled to death to work with them – they’re a fantastic partner. We’re very proud to have been accepted into the Powered by Pi program. 

This solution has enabled us to do some different things, turn on new additional interfaces, as well as getting into new spaces.

When in doubt, bring it out

Working with my lead engineer Dave, we had a philosophy: when in doubt, bring it out! By that I mean that if there was an interface on the Raspberry Pi compute module and we thought it might be useful to our customers, we brought that out externally to enable access to it. For example: analog in, digital in and out, thermocouples, current sense, voltage sense – we tried to give as much flexibility as we could. We had a “let’s see what happens attitude” and it’s giving our customers a chance to experiment and see what works.

Factor 200 for building automation

Here at OnLogic, we believe in, as they say, “eating your own dog food”. We’ve deployed our Factor 200 Series – our industrial Raspberry Pis to power the building automation in our new facility. We’re learning a lot from our experiences and it’s helping us think about the next generation of products down the line. 

Home automation using the Factor Series

Travis: I’m really a big fan of home automation and big enthusiast of it, and I like to connect everything in my house. I use the Factor 200 to collect the data and bring that data into the Ignition Maker Edition. Now I am able to see the data and visualize that around the house. 

For example, since I have the I/O, I’m able to connect to my hot water heater. For the recirculation pump, I can turn it on and off when we actually need it rather than relying on a schedule.

I can also plug in a Google Coral stick to do real time object and dog detection from the cameras I have around the house. It’s really versatile, easy for people to get access to and do a lot of great things. There is a lot of material out there in the makerspace to have a little fun.

Design considerations of an industrial Raspberry Pi

Mike: The big switch is when you move out of the PoC phase where you maybe started with a consumer Raspberry Pi that you picked up on Amazon. You can’t take that device and put it out in an oil field for example. It probably wouldn’t survive the first day. 

The first thing that you need to do is industrialize it. We spoke to that a little bit already – how it can survive tough environments. But, it’s more than just the environment – it’s also EMC and regulatory compliance. These are major factors for anybody who’s done a project that’s subject to regulatory compliance. You have to think about that during the design phase – we wanted to take that stress off of our customers. And we thought about wide deployment – meeting the standards of different countries. 

Power capabilities

There are some other things that you may not think about. For example, a standard Raspberry Pi has a little power supply adapter where you can plug it into a standard wall socket. Where these things need to be deployed, there’s no AC sockets to be found. For example: in-vehicle, on trains, shop floors, or on a DIN rail, you’ve probably got 24 volt power. So we wanted to make sure that the device could accept DC power and make sure that we could accept wide power because a lot of the times it varies. 

The Compute Module 4 (CM4)

The heart of it is the CM4 Module. When Raspberry Pi developed an industrialized Raspberry Pi module – the CM4, it really opened the door for us. That gave us the heart, and then we built around that. For example, the M.2 drive – eMMC can be great, but if you’re going to collect and store a lot of data, do store and forward, or any sort of light analysis, you’ll need something a little more robust like an M.2 SATA SSD. 

Available cellular connectivity

For connectivity, you may not have an ethernet connection or WiFi. For those sites we offer cellular connectivity with a 4G LTE option so that people can get to their data. The days of sending somebody out on a two hour drive out to that wellhead to collect that information, then drive on back to the office – those days are long past. So we created a deployable and useful solution so that our customers can gather that valuable data and get it back to the office where you can make use of it. 

Use cases with the Factor 200 Series 

Mike: We’re seeing a variety of use cases – starting with the obvious one – connecting legacy equipment. The reality of the world today is there’s a lot of existing stuff out there that works absolutely fine. Some of these old PLCs and sensors, they’re not easy to replace, nor would you want to replace them. So you can drop in a small Factor 200 and all of a sudden you can get remote access to that equipment.

Cellular connectivity for data accessibility 

Once in place, you can do some data collection and maybe a little bit of lightweight data processing. Cellular connection opens up a lot of opportunities to make the data accessible and usable. We also are seeing people use them for viewing stations, HMIs, digital signage, building automation, and more. 

Security use case

One of my favorite use cases is a security company that we’re working with. And to me, the cool thing about this use case is showing what you can do with limited power. This is Raspberry Pi. It  is not a Xeon processor. This is not server grade. This is not a $3,000 – $5,000 unit where you’re going to do AI.

This company is using sensors to do very simple triggering of potential security events. That includes proximity detectors, door opening detectors, movement detectors and more. They’re capturing that image, video and audio and bringing that into the device, doing some simple processing and then sending that up to the cloud. From there, it’s evaluated to see whether it truly was a security event.

We are at a tipping point

To me, that’s really cool to get really useful application data using very simple technology. This data is becoming more and more valuable and isn’t going to cost thousands of dollars to capture – more like hundreds of dollars. That’s why we are at a tipping point. 

What excites Inductive Automation users about the industrial Raspberry Pi? 

Travis: Historically, since Ignition has an unlimited license model, users deploy a single server and then want to connect to all of their devices and bring all that data in. Well, of course, they bring what’s important for the HMI, for what they need to run that facility.

But there are certain industries where there’s connectivity issues. Of course you’ll see that with oil and gas or wastewater. You’ve got remote telemetry out there so you could lose the connection to the remote site. But even within a manufacturing site, you might have different buildings. I’ve seen forklifts cut the fiber to a building. And if your system was purely central, you could lose data, you could lose visibility, you could lose control.

Industrial Raspberry Pi for the Edge

And so from the very beginning we called this hub and spoke architecture. Now we officially call this architecture “Edge”. Each spoke end is at the edge and we’re putting something out there close to those devices so that we can eliminate some of these connectivity issues. We can connect that data locally and we can potentially pull the data at faster rates to get it sent up to a system more efficiently.  

This solution can scale. We had scalability issues with just one centralized server. But now by distributing out the architecture, we can combat not only latency and connectivity issues, but get more data – data is gold!

90% of the data is stranded in the field – go get it!

Analysts say that approximately 90% of data gets stranded in the field. This gives us the ability to connect to that data, bring it in and democratize it to make it available to more places. And I think that’s really key to solving those challenges here. And at the same time, have a local HMI on a critical asset – there’s a lot of great use cases for it. 

It’s kind of a no-brainer for oil and gas, wastewater and those remote areas. But also for manufacturing where it’s all about getting access to more data and being able to do more with that data. Manufacturing if doing more with AI and ML. They need all that information in the cloud. We need to make it accessible. 

Fleet management

I also get really excited about fleet management. We’re seeing these devices on vehicles where they’re now able to capture real-time data and have that stored and sent up through cellular. These systems are providing an avenue to solve these challenges, plus allow for the ability to do more. With that open compute, there’s more possibilities that it opens up architecturally.

Q&A session

How much data can actually be processed by these types of Raspberry Pi powered devices? What are the possibilities?

Travis: We did a lot of benchmarking to get the sense of the upper limit. To answer – how much data can we process? And, how many devices can we connect to and bring in? Because that’s important to understand from an architecture standpoint right? If we have PLCs all throughout our factory or different sites remotely, I want to know how many Edge devices I need to put out there in order to get access to all of that data. 

Limited power doesn’t mean limited capabilities

This device is not constrained. When the first Raspberry Pi came out – it was single core with very little limited memory. But this one has a lot more processing power with that CM4, and a lot more memory available. So it opens up possibilities. We’re able to get tens of thousands of tags with this in real-time, polling at a second rate with values actually changing every second. We can connect to probably up to 50 devices – so the possibilities are really quite large. 

You can use it as one-to-one, but you could also clump a lot of devices together with a single Pi device. Plus, you also have the ability to leverage it for those local HMIs. You can easily launch a couple of clients from there and let people not only get that store and forward out there but let people interact with and control that data. It opens up a lot of possibilities because there is quite a bit of compute that is available. 

What are customization options with the Factor Series? 

Mike: Customization is something that we really pride ourselves on here at OnLogic. We give a lot of flexibility to the customer – starting with our web interface to select different options – like drives, memory – to make sure that it really fits the power that people need as well as things like Wi-Fi and cellular. Most of those technical aspects we can absolutely support. 

Branding options

The other thing that’s really fun about the Factor is that we’re able to do a lot of customization on the entire case. For example, if you have a corporate brand color – maybe you want a green computer – we can absolutely do that. 

If you’re looking to change the technical specs that’s something that we can work on with you. So I would encourage you to give us a call and tell us what your needs are and we’ll definitely work with you. We pride ourselves on trying to solve problems for our customers whatever their challenge happens to be. 

Does this only work with Ignition Edge or will it work with other editions of Ignition? 

Mike: OnLogic is part of the Ignition Onboard program with Inductive Automation. That means we can pre-load these devices with Ignition Edge. They can be drop-shipped directly out to the field. If a customer wants full Ignition or wants to put the Maker version on it, they can do that as well. We’ve got a lot of computers that work really well as MQTT Brokers or as Ignition gateways.  

Travis: Either edition will work on the device typically we’re looking at these architectures and where we’re putting them. Ignition Edge makes sense with the product because it’s really geared towards that local control. It’s geared towards that store and forward of data – pushing it up through MQTT to a centralized system. That is what it’s designed for – so people are thinking of it in that way. 

But if there are other use cases where the full edition of Ignition could be useful, that is also possible and you could buy that license from us. 

Does the Factor Series have UL certification? 

Mike: OnLogic takes UL certification very seriously and we try to come up with as many pre-configured options as we can to make that UL process very simple for folks. If UL listing is a critical need for you, I encourage you to reach out and talk with our team. 

Any work toward a LoRa Gateway? 

Mike: We’re looking at some options and I can’t promise an exact roll-out but I definitely take that feedback very seriously and it is something that we’re looking at for the future. I suggest that if you have a need, connect with us. 

What about the use of HAT modules, including LoRa collector modules?

Mike: We could probably spend a whole lot of time talking about HAT usage and modularity is something that we’re absolutely talking about for future generations. We’re trying to figure out  the right packaging. The more input that we get from our customers and the more use cases we see out there in the field will help. We do want to keep the price point very effective on this thing and design the right combination of modularity and standard features. 

Can you elaborate on the benchmarks that were processed for determining the amount of data that can be processed by these devices?

Travis: specifically the benchmarks that we did were always worst case testing. Usually it’s around the number of tags. So for example we may start with say 500 tags at a one second rate pulling from a PLC. We connect to a real PLC – we don’t want it to be a simulated value because that’s not a real world scenario. 

Typically, we’ll connect to Modbus devices and we’ll pull those values every second and we ensure those values are changing every second in that device. And the deadband in Ignition is going to be zero because we want to process those changes on every single one of them. We start with 500 and see what the CPU memory footprint looks like then we’ll go at another 500 or we might do a thousand at a time. 

Our team keeps doing that and we build a spreadsheet up where we can see what’s the upper limit. We want to know at what point our CPU starts pegging or if we don’t have enough memory available. 

With the earlier versions of Raspberry Pi, we would only get up to around a thousand to five thousand tags – it was a very small range. With the benchmark that we did, we were easily able to get up to 20 000 tags all polling every second with values changing every second. So, it’s pretty exciting – and that was set up through MQTT. We have the actual results that we can share with folks if there’s any interest. 

Can I use the device with Ignition Edge to simulate a Modbus device?

Travis: In terms of Ignition, our Modbus driver is a client driver. That means we’re going to connect to a Modbus device and we’re going to send those commands to ask for that data and pull it frequently. We are not a Modbus server and we’re not listening on that port. 

We can certainly simulate a Modbus device with Ignition in terms of building out the tags with the right naming structures and all that so if you switch it to a real PLC then it will still work with those tags. But we are not a server. 

There’s plenty of really good Modbus simulators that you can use like Mod R-Sim and others that you could use on the same device or different device. That would typically fit the bill.

How secure is a network with a Pi module – would it be in isolation behind a firewall?

Mike: It’s important to think about your architecture and also the software that you’re running on the Pi. Look at the whole security picture. That’s something our sales Engineers can really help you with.

Travis: I’ll just elaborate a little bit. We are talking about Edge a lot these days and we’re talking about being able to bring data up typically to business systems and leveraging MQTT – that’s a good example of how people are doing that. 

If we look at a traditional SCADA system and put it centrally –  it’s typically on layer three on that network along with the PLCs. They have to be able to talk to those in that Network. If I were a bad actor who was able to get on that network, I could discover all those PLCs and I could do potential harm. So it’s not necessarily about people hacking the network, it’s about more of a concern for things like USB devices that get plugged into a computer that’s on that network – we have to look at security.

What’s great about Edge devices is that you actually are putting it in front of that PLC and in this case, you have dual network interfaces where we can have one that talks to the device locally and then one that pushes that data up to a business network. When you look at MQTT, it could be a secure Transport Layer Security (TLS) connection that’s outbound. So there are no ports coming in. 

With this, you actually get a much stronger security footprint than you would have had before. Obviously IT departments can do a lot with firewalls, but I think of edge as another layer that really helps with that security posture. 

​What PLC brands will this work with? 

Travis: Ignition Edge has all the drivers built into it to talk to the different PLCs. That includes all the Allen Bradley ethernet Suite of devices, Modbus ethernet and Modbus serial are supported. Also Siemens S7 devices, BACnet, DMP3, Omron NJ and CJ and we just released the 61850 driver and we’re working on a Mitsubishi one. There’s a really good set of drivers that are available. And the system has the I/O to directly connect – analog or discrete values and then we can bring that into Ignition and have that being published up.  

Any comments on use for local HMI performance response mainly along with MQTT tag transmission?

Travis: If you’re pushing the boundaries of just setting the data up through MQTT. For example, if you’ve got let’s say 100,000 tags and they’re changing quite fast, you may not have enough room to run a client or a client could look slow. Typically we don’t see that with this. The HMI performance is immediate/sub-second and then that data is also being sent up. You kind of get the best of both worlds: your local control and that store and forward of data. 

We’re seeing a lot more of that especially nowadays when the supply chain is challenged. If a HMI dies, it’s actually very easy to then put this in with Ignition and have a local HMI replacing some of the traditional ones and you get that benefit plus other benefits so it’s a big win-win. 

Has it been tested with a Pi-based Yocto build?

Mike: We support Raspbian and we support Ubuntu. We find working with Ignition, most folks are on a Ubuntu build so that’s primarily what we focus on. Yocto should work and certainly if you want to try that we’ve got an TryLogic program where you can work with sales to get a sample unit sent out to you and then you can experiment. That’s just a conversation you should have with our folks. 

Travis: From an Ignition side the Yocto build will work fine. 

It’s been challenging to get Raspberry Pi, how are you able to keep these in stock? 

Mike: I understand! It was hard for me to get the one that I play around with at home. But that’s a consumer one. We’ve got a few things that really help us out here. First of all it’s a CM4 and that’s a completely different unit. These are the industrialized ones, not consumer grade. It’s a completely different supply chain. 

Secondly,  we have a really good partnership with Raspberry Pi. They’re absolutely awesome to work with and they’ve been very supportive of us. Lastly, our supply chain team is amazing. At OnLogic, we typically have very good availability with very reasonable lead times compared to everybody else. That’s something that we’re proud of.

Check out the Factor Series

Ready to learn more about the Factor Series of industrial Raspberry Pi computers? You can check them out here. And, if you are looking for devices delivered with Ignition Edge pre-installed, check out the IGN800 and IGN802. 

Learn more about SCADA

Ready to take a deep dive into SCADA? Claim your free copy of the Ultimate Guide to SCADA. This guide will help you understand the significant benefits of modern SCADA, what to look for in SCADA software and hardware, and how to get started when implementing a smart SCADA solution of your own.

Still have questions? 

Did we get to your question? If there’s anything that you didn’t get answered about our Industrial Raspberry Pi, please reach out to our team or to Inductive Automation to talk more about what exactly you’re trying to do. Ultimately it all comes down to fitting the device and the software to your application – your use case. We look forward to hearing from you! 

Editor’s Note: Inductive Automation has ended their Ignition Onboard program. Ignition licenses must now be purchased directly through Inductive Automation. While the IGN versions of our solutions are no longer available, our computers remain a great fit for use with Ignition software. Explore our recommended hardware here.