Gops

We are evaluating many boards for Industrial purpose, often fails to pick the right one, form Raspberry PI to other boards, including Tinkerboard. We aim to bring the cost of the SBC to 60 to 100 USD, mainly used for Industrial, within 0-70 Deg C. In fact, I have posted similar questions to find out answers, including Rock64, Olimex etc. Olimex seems to be supporting Industrial temperature, but their A64 seems to have less USB ports. Many SBCs vendor advertise their board for Education, Hobby purpose, I see Nano PC boards, they advertise for robotics, Industrial purpose http://wiki.friendlyarm.com/wiki/index.php/NanoPi_M4 with WIKI stating working temperature is 0-70 Deg C, their product page suggest 0-80 deg C. We yet to order one Nano SBC, anyone had exposure with NanoPI M4 boards, readiness for Industrial application? More importantly, it support Raspberry PI pin compatibility and additional PCI and 2 USB hosts in GPIO. I am trying to understand Olimex vs Nano PC for industrial use, excluding -40 to +85 range

We are looking at various options, right now, decided to go with Raspberry PI 2 Compatible GPIO pins, TonyMac32 seems have power circuit via GPIO pin itself, we can choose the boards based on software choice. One challenge will be with dealing underlying kernel and device driver support for our requirements, as plan to use few UART to RS-232/RS-485 and few SPI to dual UART, overall it seems better choice than under powered Beagle Bone boards. Now we focus on building IO modules and Extension and packaging. We will connect to Asus directly. Thanks for sugesstions.

@TonyMac32, thanks for the board reference, I am thinking of keeping the extension/HAT adjustant/next to the Tinker board, so the packaging shall be wider, instead of stacking it, doing this would give enough space for cooling system, also give us enough room when we buy other PI pin compatible [but not form factory compatible] Industrial SBC in open market. We need to think of big sized metal based passive cooling, instead of using a Fan, as the industry we target is textiles/spinning mills, the cotton pieces struck inside the fan, [I have visited the factories, they have many drives, I see many times due to cotton dust accumulated inside the fan somehow, the drive halt execution due to increased temperature] Regarding the power supply, do you have/sell only the power module board, I am asking something similar to this product , but this seems to output up to 20v, not exact tinker board requirement. https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1PCS-MP1584-Adjustable-3A-DC-DC-Converter-Step-Down-Voltage-Regulator-Module-Replace-LM2596s/32956356439.html @martinayotte, I decided to use SC16IS752, as per your advise on Pine64 forum [I had posted similar questions there], thank you so much for this option. Right now, ordered few boards from aliexpress for prototypes, we will have them in 4-5 days in hand. We build some options like 1 SPI to 1 RS-485, 1 RS-232 and 1 SPI to two RS-485 and 1 SPI to two RS-232 extension to get fair options and choices for industry. https://www.aliexpress.com/wholesale?catId=0&initiative_id=SB_20190428180523&SearchText=SC16IS752 7 number of RS-485 is really great, have you done anything with Olimex IND boards, we have plan to take few -40 to 85 Deg C range boards from Olimex when the industry demands it, needs to build similar extension boards.

Thank you @TonyMac32 You inspired me with your open source Pi-Power design, I will review that for our requirements. We need to add HAT to PI-2 interface, as our requirements are RS-232, RS-485 connectivity, we are planning to add SPI to dual UART support. Tinkerboard support two SPIs, this way, we could achieve, total 4 numbers of RS-232 and/or RS-485 combinations. Do you recommend to add your Pi-Power extension to the same HAT?

I try to understand the usage of Tinkerboard for Industrial Application usage, we have below questions. 1. Operating temperature is between 0-60 C [as many Industrial PLCs recommend 0-55 C only] 2. Long Term Supply of the Boards 3. Bulk Quantities buying [Get 30 to 50 boards in 2-4 weeks notice] The board and quality seems top notice, RPI interface is good for our use cases, anyone sees a risk in above points or would like to suggest something? We are looking a good sized community, Ubuntu OS, much stable and better performing board compared to Raspberry PI, all seems good with Tinkerboard. Please share your ideas and thoughts. Regards, Gops