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Tinkerboard for Industrial Use


Gops

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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

 

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40 minutes ago, Gops said:

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]

1)  You will need some type of epic cooling setup, or you will need to set the system to only go to 1.4 or 1.6 GHz to avoid wildly fluctuating behavior upon thermal throttling.

2) no idea honestly, however it is Pi-compatible in terms of footprint and GPIO.  Try to stick with abstract libraries and you should be able to simply swap another board

3) also unknown.

 

I am adding a 4:   Power.  MicroUSB is not an industrial powering solution.  Power over GPIO would be the only rational solution for this.  Something like https://github.com/Tonymac32/Pi-Power

A modification to that, assuming the SBC is not the center of the design, would be to make it with a giant hole for a large fan in the middle, I have an ADC board that moves all the power bits to the left edge, leaving the middle free for other uses.

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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? 

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This is a prototype of a board where I'm doing just that, this reads load cells, power clustered further to the left, and the ADC)instrumentation amplifiers in the middle. There are smaller footprint buck converters (read: more expensive), which use smaller caps and inductors making the whole thing a bit more compact.

Shameless plug, I run on donations just like Armbian, buying us a beer keeps us going.

 

2ab8d079ad039f90b806166fb73f7382.jpg

Sent from my Pixel using Tapatalk
 

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I ended up doing the simple thing recommended by most - seems to keep temperature constant in the 60's with the fan on - but the fan may fail one day:

 

tinker.jpg.8f888d25b4472ca5b3f3925b1cf9aef3.jpg

 

fan powered by usb as I really dislike the noise - I leave it unplugged unless there is smoke :-)

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5 hours ago, Gops said:

we are planning to add SPI to dual UART support.

Are you using SC16IS752 or something similar ?

 

5 hours ago, Gops said:

Tinkerboard support two SPIs, this way, we could achieve, total 4 numbers of RS-232 and/or RS-485 combinations.

I've done a hat board with dual SC16IS752, but both on the same SPI using two SPI-CS gpio, along with UART1/2/3, this give me 7 RS485 buses ...

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22 minutes ago, martinayotte said:

I've done a hat board with dual SC16IS752, but both on the same SPI using two SPI-CS gpio, along with UART1/2/3, this give me 7 RS485 buses ...

 

Right.  The SPI is sufficiently fast to handle multiple interfaces with ease.

 

Also something to think about:

 

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1dJq7MM1_zA5HtXywDMZ9HMKyPaNgGmkxnuz3wYuk4s8/edit?usp=sharing

 

The hardware already has 3 UARTs exposed that don't interfere with SPI.

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7 minutes ago, TonyMac32 said:

The hardware already has 3 UARTs exposed that don't interfere with SPI.

Right ! But in my case, I had to patch kernel to get "RS485 emulation" in the 8250_dw driver used by Allwinner SoC, otherwise HalfDuplex handling using RTS wasn't supported.

It seems to be the same for Rockchip since DT compatible is also "dw-apb-uart" ... Maybe I will have to commit my private patch to Armbian ...

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1 minute ago, martinayotte said:

HalfDuplex handling using RTS wasn't supported

 

On the Tinker only UART 1 and 4 have RTS/CTS exposed, so you wind up in a similar position, UART4 is sitting on top of one of the SPI's

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@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.  

 

 

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4 minutes ago, Gops said:

Regarding the power supply, do you have/sell only the power module board,  

 

I do not, but it would be a simple matter to create, using the correct components (unlike the one-size fits all that you find online, which has *terrible* efficiency and ripple).  The point of the hat, though, is to get around the amazing voltage drop and vibration sensitivity of the micro-USB.  I have some fancy charts on the forums somewhere that show massive drops across that connector at load, especially with peripherals.  Perhaps a "shim" design where the board is as low-profile as possible and actually hangs off the top side rather than down over the board? Pimoroni does that for buttons (photo courtesy Adafruit):

 

 3582-03.jpg

 

22 minutes ago, Gops said:

as the industry we target is textiles/spinning mills

 

Ah.  I used to work a great deal with coil winders (38 - 42 AWG).  Understood.  A custom cabinet to give as much dissipation as possible will be a must, the RK808 and RK3288 can tolerate quite high temperatures, but I can't speak to the rest of it.  Big Block O' Copper attached to the cabinet it is.

 

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On 4/28/2019 at 6:12 AM, Gops said:

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? 

 

I think Tinker is not qualified for the Industrial use case - might want to reach out directly to Asus there

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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. 

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