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HATs and other add-ons • Re: Industrial I/O

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I recently had a great experience implementing a data collection solution using a Pi 5 in an industrial setting... just thought I'd share it for anyone else needing to interface a Pi with industrial I/O (e.g. 24VDC inputs, relay outputs, 4-20 mA analog, etc).
20240629_165059 (Medium).jpg

Attached to the DIN rail inside my enclosure is the Pi 5 with NVMe drive and active cooler, then 3 Widgetlords modules (from bottom to top: digital output module, digital input module, analog input module). I also have a Modbus/RS-485 module that has yet to be added.

I was super impressed with the ease of adding these modules. After the one-time setup procedure for the Widgetlords library, the rest was exceedingly simple (e.g. a 3-line python program to read the status of a digital input worked first try). Also, the Widgetlords Node-RED add-on worked without any issues. Coming from the world of PLCs for over 20 years, I was expecting something difficult with much trial-and-error, but I was happily proven wrong.

This was my first my first project doing industrial data logic and data collection without a PLC, and it has really opened up my eyes to what is possible. For example, Node-RED can be setup to function like a PLC (i.e. the general concept of ladder logic/boolean flow from inputs to outputs), but with so many more exotic and expandable options to interact with the real world (e.g. MQTT, HTTP, gRPC, HTML, JSON) without being boxed-in by a PLC manufacture's limited set of instructions, and the typical overly-complicated way that communications function blocks are done in the PLC world.
Did you not need to connect power to the barrel connectors on the I/O cards?

Statistics: Posted by ejolson — Mon Jul 15, 2024 5:22 pm



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