Ignition Embedded Appliance

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.

We are having prototypes in our hands end of March. Yes, teh goal is to embed Ignition on the computer and sell it as a HMI control panel.

As for the ODROID-X, it is a good system, when they work. We have had 2 of 3 fail. Our system is rated to operate between -40C and +85C.

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.

Not possible, as Ignition has a heavy use of Swing, which is not, and will probably never be supported on Android. Also, Dalvik and JVM are completely different, so technically, this will probably never happen.

The bigger issue with using something like the ODROID-X, is it has no approvals. If that board ever, for example, caught fire, insurance would probably not cover any damage, and you could be held liable. Our system will have the following ratings
C-UL
UL
CE
Class 1 Div 2 Groups A,B,C,D
Class 1 Zone 2
Class II Div 2
Class III Div 1
C-Tick

While the lower price of an open board like the one from ODROID is great for testing an idea, but should not be used in production without the proper approvals.

[quote=“Kyle Chase”]We are having prototypes in our hands end of March. Yes, teh goal is to embed Ignition on the computer and sell it as a HMI control panel.

As for the ODROID-X, it is a good system, when they work. We have had 2 of 3 fail. Our system is rated to operate between -40C and +85C. …
.[/quote]

Kyle, thank you for your informative reply. It clarified a lot.
I have one question more: “Are you planning to make embedded Ignition software available as a separate product?”
It will help us to make our choices as well.

[quote]
Kyle, thank you for your informative reply. It clarified a lot.
I have one question more: “Are you planning to make embedded Ignition software available as a separate product?”
It will help us to make our choices as well.[/quote]

This is a product we are making, and it is endorsed by Inductive. It will have various versions of licensing available, and would be available for purchase through Inductive. We are also open to OEM solutions both through IA and separately.

We are also working on a central server system. Same deal as above, that would serve as a central gateway for far larger systems.

So, is there an Ignition release for the Arm/Armel processor available for testing?
I have the client running on my tablet (dual core Nvidia tegra 250 Cortex A9 1GHz) with a Linux Kernel I bootstrapped as a minimum build.
The client is usable, a bit slow with the ‘Ignition Demo Project’. A project with a bit less on each screen is very usable.
I would be interested in playing with, um I mean testing a Gateway build for arm…

J. Brown

@Kyle,

As we are close to release the phase 1, any price “target” ?
Also, it is not clear if the ARM version of Ignition will be available separately?

TIA