Ignition Embedded Appliance

Alrighty, Time to make this public.

We are currently creating ARM based solutions that will be running Ignition. The base PC itself will have the following specs

Phase 1 - (Target June 15) - Freescale iMX.283 processor, clocked at 484 MHz. Suitable for a small gateway appliance, data tunneler, the spoke on a hub and spoke implementation.

Phase 2 - (Target August 1) - Freescale iMX.502 processor, clocked at 800MHz. Suitable for small to medium gateway appliance, data tunneler, touch screen interface, or the hub and spoke implementation.

Phase 3 - (Target October 1, depends when released from freescale) - Freescale IMX.6 - Single, Dual and Quad Core iMX.6 processors, clocked at 1.2 GHZ. This will be able to do anything you can currently do with Ignition, including acting as a base server for medium sized installation.

Memory - 1 GB
Storage - mSATA SSD (up to 128 GB storage) - default is 32 GB

Ports/Slots
2x Gigabit Ethernet ports, 1x MAC each
4x USB 2.0 ports, for storage, connectivity, touch screen.
1x DVI Port, for display
2x RS-232/485 Ports, Hardware configurable, DB-9 connection
1x mPCI slot, with options for cellular modem, wifi, and bluetooth

Screens (Optional)- 6",10" and 15". Custom screens up to 24"

The enclosure itself is an all metal enclosure, anodized “Ignition” blue, with an orange Ignition logo on the side.
DIN rail mounted box
A small OLED screen is on each enclosure, to display information about performance, state, etc.

10 - 31 VDC Power
-40 to 85 C rating
CSA Class 1 Div 2 rating, groups A,B,C,D

Without a SSD, the machine will run Ignition, with no local database. If an SSD is installed, then the embedded database will start up and be present in the system, ready for Ignition to use.

Upgrade Ignition or base OS by simply plugging in a USB drive.

Developed with Inductive Automation and Oracle.

Final pricing is to still be set, but it will competitive with existing competition. We currenly have 5 out of the box configurations planned, and an open license box.

  1. OPC -UA Gateway - OPC-UA server on a box

  2. Panel Edition - same as current panel edition

  3. Standard Edition - Local control and trending, batching, etc.

  4. Datalogger Edition - Store data to a database, or CSV

  5. Ignition Data Gateway - To be used with a larger central Ignition server. Seamlessly move Ignition data from the plant floor/production field to a central SCADA server.

  6. Open License - Ability to license on your own.

Nice! I like the server offering too.

Hi, The company I work for and myself have taken an interest in trying to get an ignition server functioning properly on an ARM device, specifically the relatively new Raspberry Pi.
It’s proving to be a bit of a task unfortunately and I was hoping to find out at what stage the project described is at, when it will be available for use and if there was any information on pricing as of yet.
If it’s not too far off, I’ll probably scrap this project, it’s giving me nothing but headaches so far! Unless of course you’d like to supply me with the source code :wink: !

The raspberry pi is horribly incapable of producing the results your looking for. There is couple pi threads on here that suggests alternatives. It is possible though. Jordan Clark was the guy that posted some great screenshots and comments.

Yeah, I was getting that impression, ARMv6 etc etc…
Thanks I’ll have to have a look when I have a chance
As it stands I’m just looking at using a relatively cheap embedded x86 or x64 linux server from compulab for now

If you want to play with the image I have:

http://inductiveautomation.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=31462#p31462

Thanks for that, love your description of the RPi " very important research and development hardware", how long did you have to wait for delivery? I was lucky, managed to get in before the sites crashed. But going to have to order revision 2 I do believe!

It will be interesting to see how the server runs on it (when it runs properly), I didn’t think the client would run particularly well but for such a cheap piece of equipment, having the server on such a cheap piece of arm based hardware running linux, setting up redundancy and even multiple remote servers would be awesomely cheap and sending updates via SD card to those remote ones not so well connected would be very convenient! Really, for non-essential services that don’t require perfect timing, it could even be used as an effective remote IO rather than having to spend unnecessary amounts on other hardware.

I think this is a project well worth doing!! :smiley:

Getting Ignition to run on the ARM platform has a few hurdles to surpass. Our boxes are delayed, however, should be releases late Q1 2013 to early adopters.

Have you looked at CuBox:

solid-run.com/

Dennis

That is one sweet little device :thumb_left:

[quote=“DennisWomack”]Have you looked at CuBox:
solid-run.com/
Dennis[/quote]

Here is another one to look at:

www.pengpod.com

Is the Allwinner A10 an ARM 7 cpu? Java for it? Compatible with Ignition?

Dennis

The PengPod and PengStick both look nice. The Allwinner A10 SoC is an ARM Cortex-A8 which is ARMv7 (don’t you love ARM versioning?) so it should run headful Java :slight_smile:. The company seems to only be 3 guys, so we’ll have to wait and see if they can deliver…

Question to Kyle Chase: Are we there yet?

We are eager to get try ARM version of Ignition. We see this as great opportunity to make rugged and compact SCADA/HMI appliance for us and our partners and bring new capabilities with it.

I’ll jump on this question, too.

I’m particularly interested in a small Ignition client that I could hook to a small touchscreen. I have one customer who is about to write a P.O. for $8000 worth of A-B PanelView Plus terminals, and all I can think about is how much more usable machine information he could get from Ignition.

Maybe if I buy him a bunch of iPads he’ll stop and listen.

Actually, we had some set backs mid last year, but have been forging forward for the last 6 months.

Current state of the project.

  • Prototype hardware is in our hands. Quad Core, 2 GB Ram, mSata for storage.
  • Custom OS is 75% done. Boots to Ignition, in about 1.5 minutes from cold boot. We are working on this bringing down. Optimizations regarding power consumption still being worked on. Network and system configuration menus being built.
  • Benchmark quite (will be open sourced upon release of our hardware) is working, to benchmark system changes.
  • Hardware enclosure - To meet Classification requirements, we are still designing this.

I will update this thread more frequently.

Fantastic work Kyle :smiley: , we’re currently looking at doing a project which would make use of at least 6 arm based solutions exactly like this, keep us posted.

[quote=“Kyle Chase”]Actually, we had some set backs mid last year, but have been forging forward for the last 6 months.

Current state of the project.

  • Prototype hardware is in our hands. Quad Core, 2 GB Ram, mSata for storage.
  • Custom OS is 75% done. Boots to Ignition, in about 1.5 minutes from cold boot. We are working on this bringing down. Optimizations regarding power consumption still being worked on. Network and system configuration menus being built.
  • Benchmark quite (will be open sourced upon release of our hardware) is working, to benchmark system changes.
  • Hardware enclosure - To meet Classification requirements, we are still designing this.

I will update this thread more frequently.[/quote]

I am wondering what are the reasons for developing of custom OS? Perhaps, the goal is to offer this as new Inductive Automation product.
We’ve tested COTS quad core ARM with 1 GB RAM, Linaro Ubuntu OS and OpenJDK. It allows to run Ignition web client on Firefox and works as a desktop substitute. However, the goal is to run it as headless Ignition server only. The board has eMMC up to 64GB and extra SDHC memory which is enough for a small plant. We can always replicate database using network storage. Remote access via SSH allows to do all house keeping. Passive cooling is sufficient for this board.
This set-up will work for our projects and our potential customers. Hope ARM version of Ignition will be available as a separate product not a bundle.
Thank you!

Hi Custom8,

Can you tell us what is your hardware manufacturer ?

An embedded box interests me for a couple of purposes, depending on how pricing ends up.

  1. I have a remote site that is connected with an unreliable ethernet connection. Most of the time, it works, and I can do alarms and such through Ignition. With the new alarming features in 7.6, it’s going to work great. However, I find myself having to fall back to other methods for alarms (phone line via auto dialer) should we lose comm. It would be great to have an ignition box on site for store and forward of alarms and trends, but be able to send out alarms on it’s own should we lose communication. An embedded box, and a “limited” license would be great for this site. A full Ignition license is too much to spend, but a limited license in either points or functionality may help. I suggest this because I don’t know how it fits into one of your standard configurations mentioned earlier in the thread.

  2. On-Site data logger. I have a distributed network of 100+ meters that I would love to drop an ignition box at each site. Right now I have another hardware modbus data logger that does the trick, but the additional features of Ignition would be great.

Just thought I’d toss a few uses that I would have for these boxes out there to help guide the product.

[quote=“gnguyen”]Hi Custom8,

Can you tell us what is your hardware manufacturer ?[/quote]
This is ODROID-X which is open mobile development platform based on Samsung Exynos4412 ARM Cortex-A9 Quad Core 1.4GHz from www.hardkernel.com

This is the same processor that is running various Android tablets. In my opinion it would be great to be able to utilize Android tablets for SCADA. They are mass produced, have high resolution touch screen and low cost. Android framework can be stripped to accommodate SCADA.
The main obstacle is Java VM. It seems to me that one good solution would be to make Android VM - Dalvik working instead of Oracle Java. But this is for Inductive Automation to decide, I am not an expert in this matter.
It is also possible to install Ubuntu on some Android tablets but drivers for the most of sensors are not available and functionality will be limited.