
Strato Pi – An Industrial Raspberry Pi - camtarn
https://www.sferalabs.cc/strato-pi/
======
nimbius
Ive worked in industrial manufacturing before, and I presently work as an
engine mechanic in a small chain of midwestern diesel repair stores. I use
_regular_ raspberry pi's to pull data from ECU/OBD systems, and I even store
that data on a PI server as part of a customers work ticket data.

the problem with anything thats 'industrialized' is that so many companies use
this as a chance to gin up the price and double down on rent-seeking behavior.
This thing takes a $45 pi and jacks the price up to $250USD. Some of the
goofier features include:

\- on-board buzzer. You know, because over the constant din of lathe, shave,
and heat treat assembly line systems you're surely going to pay attention to
the buzzer from something the size of a pack of smokes. anything essential
should be shown on the light tower or picked up by QA.

\- standard RS-232 and RS-485 interfaces to the Raspberry Pi serial line, with
opto-isolator and electrostatic discharge protection: Motoman, Fanuc,
Mitsubishi, and almost every other automation hardware have used cat5 for a
decade. doesnt the pi have grounded cat5?

CAN network support - god no. This jumps into the realm of medical systems,
elevator controls, and passenger vehicles. all of these are made of
intrinsically isolated circuits and go through some of the most rigorous
testing imaginable. For example, RF leakage common in a PI could cause
aberrant failures or signaling problems in robotics that arent expecting it.
CAN type controllers can withstand shock/heat/humidity many times that of what
a normal computer can handle. Introducing the PI as a CAN device is asking for
grievous bodily harm as a service.

~~~
joshvm
On the pricing front. I've designed systems which use the RPi as a base and
are sold for several hundred pounds (spectrometers).

The reason is basically margin and not going out of business. If you want to
make any money, you need to sell at around 3x your BOM cost to compensate for
distribution, optional sales events, labour, amortised certification costs and
so on.

Working backwards, $250 means about $85 in parts. A custom printed DIN rail
case probably costs $15-20 in small volume, the Pi is $45 and that only leaves
$20 or so for the PCB and components which seems easy enough if they've over-
specced it for industry. I wouldn't be surprised if this thing costs $100 to
build; not including labour, packaging and shipping.

This is a classic "I'm an engineer and could build this for 1/3 the price" \-
sure you could. But you couldn't sell it that cheaply and make a business out
of it.

~~~
jjeaff
Doesn't sound like he's saying that. Sounds like he is saying the $35 model
will work just fine. And it is already proven and produced on a mass scale.

~~~
joshvm
This is an extension kit to a well designed and well adopted embedded system.
The OPs complaints to me read as: nobody wants these features because the
stock model works for OP, and that the price was jacked up to cater to an
industrial market. I addressed the second point above - to stay in business,
hardware costs money.

On the first point, the product definitely provides benefits over the stock
Pi. If you need those improvements, you need them. The $35 model will die if
you plug in a logic level that isn't 3V3. It certainly won't handle standard
RS-232. It doesn't have a proper power jack - either USB Micro or two GPIO
pins (no latching). It also doesn't come with a DIN rail mounting system, nor
an RTC, nor a UPS, nor a good voltage regulator. Some people might want those
features (I've worked jobs where they would have been useful.)

Also on the buzzer front - not all DIN boxes are in factories. They're used
inside buildings for power distribution and fuses, in greenhouses to control
irrigation systems. These aren't necessarily noisy environments.

------
snops
The big problem with using the raspberry pi in industrial applications is the
single source and short production lifespan gauruntee (6 years [1]) making
maintainance or long term production difficult. Industrial machines (e.g.
printing presses) will easily last decades, and you often hear of problems
finding suitable replacement electronics for them, so basing your control
system on a single sourced component is a bit dangerous.

Other single board computers or system on module offer 10 year production
lifetimes from introduction, e.g Variscite. This is possible as the
manufacturer of the SoC (generally NXP or TI) also gauruntee to produce the
silicon for 10 years, and as (unlike Broadcom) they will sell to anyone,
alternative boards are available with the same processor should one board
manufacturer go bust. They are a bit more expensive, but a trivial percent of
the overall cost for an industrial application, and the difference isn't that
much once you add a case, protection, industrial power supply etc.

1\.
[https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=193995](https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=193995).

------
halbritt
I've been testing this one from Balena (formerly Resin)

[https://www.balena.io/fin/](https://www.balena.io/fin/)

It's a carrier for the Raspberry Pi compute module. Solves many of the
problems it has in an industrial environment. It takes 6-24vdc, has real eMMC
storage, an RTC, a hardware coprocessor that can be used as a watchdog and an
mPCIE. I think there's a DIN case for it as well.

All that for a bit over a hundred dollars plus the $40 for the compute module.
That seems pretty decent at that price. The next step up seems to be a "cheap"
x86 IPC at a few hundred dollars.

------
kehrlann
I've had numerous failures on older RPi models due to SD card corruption, even
in non-write intensive contexts. Not sure this is good enough when you want
reliability...

~~~
TickleSteve
Thats a well known issue with standard distributions, and there are fairly
well known ways around it...

Basically, don't do continuous writing to the card, turn off atime
updates,possibly even work entirely from the initrd if possible. Also, use
proper industrial sd cards, these have proper wear-levelling and bad-block
management unlike the consumer cards.

In other words, treat it as an embedded system and tailor it to your use-case.

~~~
sgt
I've tried all these "ways around it", but SD card corruption still happens on
Raspberry Pi's. We use them as dashboards around the office so having them
running 24/7 really tests these devices.

I've found that the only working recipe for a stable Raspberry Pi is a USB
hard drive (prefer SSD but mechanical also fine), and a UPS.

My simple advice is: do not try to run Raspberry Pi from SD cards in
"production" under any circumstances on a large scale, as you will run into
filesystem corruption and create a lot of work for yourself.

~~~
TickleSteve
I agree, which is why in a properly designed system you would run from initrd,
its a single purpose system after all. No need for any sd card access once the
image has been read into RAM. The SD card is read-only in this case. Also, I
wouldnt trust consumer sd cards at all, they typically lack to necessary
features to store data reliably anyway.

~~~
sgt
Would TinyCore be a good option for us? We just need to run RPi's and Chromium
to display a web page.

~~~
elcritch
Not familiar with TinyCore myself, but I’d recommend trying Nerves Kiosk if a
webpage kiosk is your primary goal [1]. Getting all of the FS settings right
and a tuned system like daviduum talks about is tricky IMHO. Though it should
be possible with Yocto Linux or similar as well I’d imagine, especially with
‘fwup’ or similar in the loop. Nerves uses ‘fwup’ [2] to create a R/O squashfs
filesystem for the core OS image which is also highly compressed.

1:
[https://github.com/LeToteTeam/kiosk_system_rpi3/blob/master/...](https://github.com/LeToteTeam/kiosk_system_rpi3/blob/master/README.md)
2: [https://github.com/fhunleth/fwup](https://github.com/fhunleth/fwup)

------
syntaxing
I can see specific usage of these but probably not large scale usage.
Industrial things need to work 100% of the time and has to easily talk to
other devices reliably usually in the form of some redudant network. It'll be
pretty hard to convince engineers to use these on industrial equipment. The
early 2010s were extremely lack luster for industrial electronics
technological advancement. Everything you used were ancient (development of
them started probably before I was born). But the mass adoption of
Ethernet/ethercat have been speeding things up.

------
dev_dull
> _Hardware watchdog_

I thought the broadcom chip provided a hw watchdog that's integrated directly
into the linux kernel?

~~~
mlaretallack
Its usual for an external watchdog to be added for industrial applications
that cannot be disable ( or fail to be enabled) by firmware/software.

------
berbec
I know I'm not the target market for their UPS addon, but is 91.00€ for a UPS
board [1] that does not include the required lead-acid battery sound
reasonable? I know they have gone through the certification process for
everything, but doesn't this seem fairly high?

The battery is not lithium, but lead-acid. For an application using a
Raspberry Pi, I generally assume size is a fairly major consideration.
Considering a lead acid battery will need to be three times the size for
similar charge capacity, doesn't this battery chemistry choice seem very
strange?

A quick google brought me to the PiJuice HAT [2], a $54 piHAT, with an
included 1820mAH LiPo. This device also doesn't massively increase the size of
the Pi. PiJuice claims "~4 to 6 hours in constant use". Let us assume this is
a vastly inflated figure designed by the marketing department. Isn't 2 hours
run time more than enough for a UPS? If the power failure is longer, I want my
UPS to allow me to safely shut down my gear.

1: [https://www.sferalabs.cc/product/strato-pi-ups-
board/](https://www.sferalabs.cc/product/strato-pi-ups-board/) 2:
[https://ameridroid.com/products/pijuice-
hat-1](https://ameridroid.com/products/pijuice-hat-1)

~~~
FullyFunctional
LiPo is a really terrible choice for a UPS; it'll wear out quite quickly. LiFo
is way better, like this:
[https://www.crowdsupply.com/silicognition/lifepo4wered-pi-
pl...](https://www.crowdsupply.com/silicognition/lifepo4wered-pi-plus)

~~~
snovv_crash
LiFePO4 is also much more fire resistant due to punctures, shocks and
overcharging, which is also good for an industrial setting.

------
wigiv
It's nice to see more options becoming available in this space. Industrial PCs
(and, in the same vein, PLCs) from the old-guard industrial automation
providers are generally lackluster for the cost, in my experience. So many
acts of industrial automation and robotic system integration can be achieved
with a Raspberry Pi and/or an Arduino, with a little hardening.

------
camtarn
As an example of how we might consider using these:

We work on a lot of short-lived one-off experimental projects, and we
currently use B&R industrial controllers for more or less everything. However,
these use a clunky Windows-only development environment and can only be
programmed in C/C++. For some projects - e.g. putting a data logger in a low
voltage electrical cabinet, which interfaces to some gear using
serial/modbus/CAN and analog/digital I/O and uploads the results to the cloud
- this could potentially be quite useful. We don't often work on safety-
critical systems, or require 5-nines uptime.

The only thing is that this system isn't _that_ cheap compared to B&R gear,
although not having to pay a subscription for the dev environment helps.

------
pmontra
A feature I didn't see anywhere is the ability to start the PI at a given time
or after receiving a wake on LAN packet. This would be useful in several
scenarios like performing some task, shutdown and boot again later, maybe at a
time programmed by the PI itself.

~~~
Doxin
a RPI uses so little power that it makes no sense to do wake-on-lan, and
indeed the RPI doesn't support wake on lan at all. Just leave it on and idle.

------
tossaway44
The other day I saw someone commenting on aMLC SD cards and their increased
tolerance to sudden power loss and generally rougher conditions. Can’t find
it, though. Anyone have a link?

~~~
Fnoord
I wrote about this in the past various times. For example here [1]. I learned
about it from HN as well though.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18275494](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18275494)

------
mdturnerphys
I've been using the PLCs from UniPi [0] for a few months. They started with
Raspberry-Pi-based systems but now have a Allwinner-H5-based system with built
in memory. They have a significant number of digital and analog ports,
depending on the model, and work with a number of different programming
solutions.

[0] [https://www.unipi.technology/](https://www.unipi.technology/)

------
dsl
It is awesome to see battery backup being added to the Pi. There aren't any
good solutions currently short of a full on UPS or a consumer grade battery
pack.

~~~
Havoc
Well given that the raspberry is decidedly consumer grade too I don't see an
issue with running it off a name brand powerbank.

~~~
bonzini
AdaFruit's "Powerboost 1000 charger" is not cheap but it's very good and also
has USB power pass-through pin, in order to detect power failures. However you
will need a 5V-3.3V level converter to feed it to the RPi's GPIO pins.

~~~
ficklepickle
I got some clones of these made in China to save money. All in all, pretty
happy. Although they really need a heatsink if you want to push 1A
continuously, and the IC is so small it is hard to dissipate all that heat.
One of them will push as much current as possible until it overheats and shuts
off, but the rest seem fine.

I plan on trying to use 2 in parallel to make a UPS for my pi.

I've used one with good results on a low power IoT door unlocker. When the
door is closed, a Qi charger make contact and powers the device. When the door
is open, it runs off battery.

------
DrNuke
These customised Pi packages are hit and miss indeed but you can very often
find a pretty neat plug-and-play solution for your particular problem that
saves you time, so paying $150 instead of $75 is great ROI for your business.

------
qwerty456127
Cool but is there something similar yet less expensive for not-really-
industrial usage? Built-in UPS and hardware watchdog seem really valuable for
almost everybody.

------
antpls
Could this be used for space projects, like satellites? (Thinking about the
name)

~~~
pas
The rPi chip itself is not rad-hardened, so it'd require a bulky shielding,
that'd increase the launch mass, which is a lot more expensive than a more
space suited chip. Also, launching into space requires a lot better
electronics. Sure, it'd work likely, but .. when a launch is that expensive,
you wouldn't accept these risks.

------
plumeria
Another option worth considering is the Modberry:
[https://modberry.techbase.eu/](https://modberry.techbase.eu/)

~~~
tomcam
Login just to see the prices? Classy!

~~~
plumeria
Well, we ended up quoting a custom build with them, and it was slightly
cheaper than the Strato Pi. I agree that pricing information for standard
configurations should be available.

