x86 for professional-grade performance

“For all the people building robots and drones and wanting to do hardware hacking, BeagleBone Black has all that expansion hardware on there,” Kridner adds. “For some of these platforms, if you wanted to do anything real-time, like precision timing for motor control, you would have to go out and buy an Arduino or some other sort of microcontroller system. Here, there are two 32-bit 200 embedded computer that have direct access to the pins. They are real-time and can let Linux do some of the things that it is great at like networking, high-level language support, GUI development, and the big number crunching, and let the embedded computer live on those 200 MHz microcontrollers. You come to it with whatever development baggage you already have; if you want to go into real engineering design and make an end product out of it, there is no barrier to doing that.”

As the industrial market continues filling out with developers of varying skill levels and intentions, the need for different classes of development boards has also emerged. Recently, industrial maker boards have been released, offering increased compute power and high-speed I/O interfaces. Though slightly more expensive than their ARM-based predecessors, they target more serious development and are capable of scaling into traditional embedded applications.

refer to:
http://embedded-computing.com/articles/diy-pushes-open-hardware-kindergarten-kickstarter/

IT Technology for industrial applications

With that said, the controls world is going to be moving with anautomation that has a definite consumer bias, with product development and release cycles of six months or less. In an industry where the average life expectancy of an automotive production line is eight years, it is impossible to expect the networking in an industrial setting to keep up with modern IT standards. Therefore, we turn our attention to the technologies that have existed the industrial, with the most open standards and the very best support. These are the protocols we wish to use and keep, and this article highlights and explains some of these technologies. This article does not focus on the technical implementations of each piece of technology. Rather, it is assumed the reader will be using packaged solutions such as a function block for a PLC.

refer to:
http://www.automation.com/leveraging-it-technology-for-industrial-controls-applications

The embedded system integrations

What’s more, the 4th solutions generation Intel Core processors are more energy efficient than their predecessors, enabling smaller form factors for constrained spaces and easier heat dissipation. The high performance and low power also make it possible to consolidate multiple automation workloads (such as supervisory control and image processing) on a single computing device solutions – a topic we will revisit shortly. Intel AVX 2.0 also extends integer vector processing from 128 bits to 256 bits, also doubling throughput for many fanless embedded systems workloads. Along the way we’ll present examples where members of the Intel Intelligent Systems Alliance are taking advantage of the new embedded systems.

refer to:

http://embedded-computing.com/articles/transform-factory-the-intel-core-processor/