The Industrial Raspberry Pi Forum

Hi,

My name is Zeke I am from Los Angeles California. My company is using the RPI3 for controlling our Interactive/LED/Video/Automation systems that we produce for our clients.

This is our setup:

Master/Slave configuration (1-8 PI's)
64-256 channels software PWM to LED's
64-256 mosfets or SS relays 2-5a
Node-Red to control the LAN Network / Dashboard / GPIOD
LAMP/MEAN Stack Server for serving GUI pages
4k Touch Screen GUI Control
1-6 HDMI video outputs
Router/Switch

Our PI's are very sensitive and our clients are not. Our clients plug/unplug our systems at will with no shutdown.
Sometimes our systems are traveling in the back of trucks hundreds of miles, bouncing on every bump.
Sometimes our technicians does ground to 12v on our gpio by accident when replacing LED's.

My boss is looking for a Industrial PI system that can handle such abuse / would be capable of replacing our current system. Do you think this system can be a good replacement for us?


Thank you for your response.
-Zeke Rich
Los Angeles

Hi,
sorry for the late response.
Using the RevPi would solve all the reliability problems. But your Io concept is a non industrial concept as you are using the GPIOs of a raspi to drive power MOS Fets this is more or less an embedded concept. Our DO modules are using indusrial grade PLC type outputs (24 V high side switches or puch pull) with only poor PWM possibilities and are cyclically exchanging their data over a backpolane bus with 5 to 40 ms cycle time (depending on the amount of modules connected).
If you want to solve this you would need to switch to a different IO concept using reliable bus systems to control the LEDs. You could use TCP/IP or Modbus RTU controlled LED controller like many LED Displays do. Another very modern concept would be to use the reasonable DMX controlled RGB LED units available form Far East. Such LEDs can be easily controlled by our DMX Gateway (up to 175 RGB LEDs on one bus if the bus is short) with a quite high refresh rate of 25 ms.
Hope this helps...