Here's an interesting roundup of automation grade motherboards.

http://www.linuxtech.net/features/intel_atom_pineview_motherboards_overview.html

There are a few that don't get the fanless thing.

Regards,
cww

 

I've had a fanless VIA mini-ITX board for a few years now. The power supply is a small lap-top style "brick", so the PS is fanless as well. This sort of stuff is designed for industrial and point of sale applications. The form factor is supported by multiple vendors so there is lots of choice. AMD is supposedly coming out with a new low power CPU, so that will make a third CPU vendor to provide a low power x86 CPU for this form factor.

It's worth noting that the DFI LR100-N16M (mentioned in the article) has dual Ethernet ports. That lets you use one port for the machine level I/O and the other for plant level integration while keeping the networks separate. It also has a CF slot, which is intended to allow you to run diskless as well. You can add a monitor and keyboard and mouse (or a touch screen) to add a low cost HMI. If you need multiple HMI panels at different operator stations then you can network panel PCs to the controller and use a web based HMI.

This is the sort of hardware MBLogic is intended to run on if you are using it for machine control. Given the low cost of these systems, I can imagine a lot of automation vendors in future simply sticking these into their own branded cases with their software pre-loaded and selling them as a "PAC" to replace their PLC product lines (except for the very low end "shoeboxes").

It's also worth noting that there is some very inexpensive off the shelf ARM hardware starting to be available as well. These typically come with Debian pre-loaded on them, so you get a full featured OS.

 

> I've had a fanless VIA mini-ITX board for a few years now. The power supply is a small lap-top style "brick", so the PS is fanless as well. This sort of stuff is designed for industrial and point of sale applications. The form factor is supported by multiple vendors so there is lots of choice. AMD is supposedly coming out with a new low power CPU, so that will make a third CPU vendor to provide a low power x86 CPU for this form factor.
>
> It's worth noting that the DFI LR100-N16M (mentioned in the article) has dual Ethernet ports. That lets you use one port for the machine level I/O and the other for plant level integration while keeping the networks separate. It also has a CF slot, which is intended to allow you to run diskless as well. You can add a monitor and keyboard and mouse (or a touch screen) to add a low cost HMI. If you need multiple HMI panels at different operator stations then you can network panel PCs to the controller and use a web based HMI. <

Very interesting! Available Ethernet based open source fieldbus protocols are currently: EtherCAT, Ethernet/IP, Ethernet PowerLink, Modbus/TCP and Sercos III.

Most of them are available for Linux distributions. We are testing in the moment the performance of the openSUSE kernel 2.6.31 with the real-time patch for pre-emptive kernel operations. It looks very promising. SMP and multi-core support (CPU shield) are working very well. No problems with application cycle times of 200us ... the interrupt latency is in the range of 12us with a 1.2 GHz dual core machine. Driver are also possible in user space (UIO) ... stable and fast and secure distributed operations are possible with TIPC. BTW ... the next version of DACHSview-SDL will support this environment.

Best Regards,
Armin Steinhoff
http://www.steinhoff-automation.com

 

In reply to Armin Steinhoff: You said: "openSUSE kernel 2.6.31 (...) the next version of DACHSview-SDL will support this environment".

Are you porting your HMI graphics from Photon to QT or GTK+ (or something else)? If so, you might want to have a look at a discussion we had here "http://www.control.com/thread/1261863719". One of the participants in the discussion is animating SVG in QT with C++.

 

> In reply to Armin Steinhoff: You said: "openSUSE kernel 2.6.31 (...) the next version of DACHSview-SDL will support this environment".
>
> Are you porting your HMI graphics from Photon to QT or GTK+ (or something else)? <

Our graphics environment is based on the lib SDL (http://www.libsdl.org). It is using only very low level Photon (QNX) calls in order to build some kind of frame buffer. SDL is portable and available for a lot of other operating systems. The version for Linux supports also OpenGL rendering ... so it has an excellent performance. It is also possible to import/blit SVG surfaces created by "cairo" ....

> If so, you might want to have a look at a discussion we had here "http://www.control.com/thread/1261863719". One of the participants in the discussion is animating SVG in QT with C++. <

Thanks ... I will read that thread.

Best Regards,
Armin Steinhoff

PS: build your system as OS independent as much as possible ...