Industruino - DIN-rail Leonardo compatible

Hi everyone,

After one year of prototyping I am glad to announce to you 'Industruino'. It is a fully enclosed DIN-rail mountable Arduino compatible board + onboard LCD screen + membrane button panel + prototyping area. Me and my wife Ainura created Industruino for situations where you want to take your Arduino based project from the breadboard to a finished installation.
Please have a look at our website for more information: www.industruino.com

We would be grateful to hear what the Arduino community thinks of it. Any constructive feedback/suggestions are welcomed.

Best regards,

Loic

I like it and can defiantly see a use for it. The only thing i'd like to see is 6 buttons perhaps instead of three and maybe a couple of little led's some were under the screen a green one and a red one for power indicators or such like. Maybe colour one of the buttons red and another green as well.

Looks like a very nice implementation.

@EVP & Chagrin: Thank you very much for the kind words! Nice to hear that you like it!

@EVP: Good point on the red power LED. I will look at implementing this in next version. With more LED's I have to watch out not to occupy too many I/O pins. Maybe I could add a few extra generic LED on the front panel which could be disconnected from I/O using jumpers. D13, which on official Arduino boards has an LED usually used for simple Blink test projects, is connected to my LCD backlight LED's on Industruino. This way it has double function, also quite cool when it is running the bootloader (PWM flashing the backlight :slight_smile: ).
Concerning extra buttons on the membrane panel: We can easily make custom membrane panels with extra buttons, as all buttons are read on a single analog pin. For very specific applications or customised product we can produce custom panels. The idea was to keep the design neutral and simple so to fit as many applications as possible. For this standard version we chose a three button layout, mainly for ergonomic reasons. The menus can quite easily be navigated using this setup, and values changed. We are thinking in the future to make an Industruino version without lcd screen and more I/O. This version could have a more extended membrane panel as there would be more space on the front face of the enclosure.

Best Regards,

Loic

I'd personally go with a dual red/green LED - that way you could potentially have three colors available with only a couple pins. Also, a small piezo buzzer/speaker would be helpful (put it on a pin for the Tone library). On both of these options, the ability to disable (via jumpers or switches) them (to free up pins as needed) would be nice, too.

I would be interested to hear from people what they would like to see developed as baseboards for Industruino (the equivalent of shields with standard Arduino).
Standard Industruino comes with an empty prototyping baseboard which allows anyone to add their own circuits, but for certain applications we intend to develop custom baseboards.

As a first board we are planning to develop a 4-20ma I/O + PT100 board, to facilitate the connection to off the shelve industrial sensors and actuators.
The second item on our list is an ethernet board, but we are debating whether maybe this should be integrated in the main controller board instead (top board) as a different model altogether. Other ideas that came to mind were: 1. RFID + relay board 2. fibre-optic connection board (for long distance comms, or opto-isolated triggering of HV systems) 3. RS485/DMX board.

So please, any suggestions for baseboards would be appreciated and considered for development.

Loic

Looks very good and as speakers before I like to have some extra buttons with small cables so I can decide to connect or not.
+1

The LED idea I like too but maybe you should have pieces that are easy to remove [doordrukstrips ] so I can decide If I want leds or a switch or so.

And of course I want an Ethernet shield (or other communicating shield) inside as everything should be connected. Is that possible?

(You can PM me in Dutch if you want to)

It could be a good in it with a model without display and with knaper and RGB LEDs, instead of and to minimize the number of I / O pins you can use a PCF8574 is an I ² C bus to LEDs

I can self use one that has display, 3 buttons, Ethernet and RS485 (terminal) and have the opportunity to self add a TO-220 regulator, for I have 24V DC to another controller to run together

@K7-3D: Thanks for the tip on the PCF8574! I2C expanders will definitely play an important role in feature add-ons for Industruino. I can imagine that a DIN-rail extension board with say 8 relays, all driven by the Industruino's I2C bus could be very useful.

In its current incarnation Industruino can already house all the options that you mention (v-reg, rs485, ethernet) on the empty prototyping base board. I'm looking now on how to integrate Ethernet as option on the base board without sacrificing too much space of prototyping area.

If you're working with 24V DC please have a look at this: http://www.mornsun-power.com/cn/product_inf.aspx?typeID=62#
They have the same pinout as 7805 regulators but are switching instead of linear type. So when working with >12V they are really useful because they are much more efficient and thus don't generate much heat, don't need a bulky heat-sink, and save power. I'm planning to offer them as an option on future versions of Industruino. I've used their isolated versions before and I am very happy about them. If you don't want a Chinese brand you can get the same types from XP-power.

I recentely played with a PCF8574 and the PCF8574 can act as a sink for 10mA but as a source it can provide less current, 0.1mA.

When I connected the GND side of the LED to the PCF8574 and the other side on +5V the LED works as expected.
When I connected the +5V side of the LED to the PCF8574 and the other side to GND the LED fail to light up brightly.

Reading back the status of a line also failed but I don't recall in which of the 2 scenario's.

solution I used - additional transistor to drive the led

I got an idea that you can use an angled 5-pole female HDR connector on the controller and a male connector on the expansion modules as and in the accordance followed a female connector on the other side of the expansion module so you can just link them together

and in the HDR connector will be SDA, SCL, VCC, GND and Vin

I hope you can use my idea to develop the Industruino

Any news on the ethernet part? I'm very interested in that as I'm planning to do a home automation project based the Industruino.

It is the most professional, industrial-oriented solution for Arduino I have seen.

It is what most industrial customers like to see: a small box to be DIN rail mounted.

From my experience, it sends the arduino platform to industrial arena.

Hi everyone,

After two months of working on improving Industruino I am pleased to announce that we have finally released the next version (beta3) of Industruino which incorporates all the suggestions from our early beta testers. Please have a look at www.industruino.com for new pictures and more information.

We will now have more time to work on Industruino Ethernet, which will be implemented on a baseboard using the Wiznet W5200 chip. The idea is to have a baseboard which can be swapped into an existing Industruino to add Ethernet functionality (same principle as shields really...). We see the urgency of Ethernet functionality so we will push to release asap. I expect early beta samples in a months time.

Greetings,

Loic

In the pinout diagram on the website you could show which pins are on top and which are on the bottom side of the industruino - just add 2 colours in the background.

Less important:
the images on the website - upper right - do not reflect the new design => mirror the image and your done :wink:

my 2 cents,

Excellent! Exactly what we are looking for.

Weatherproof enclosure? Integrated CATkit shield?

I will PM you. 8)

Excellent product !!!!

That's what i'm looking for 8) 8)

I think that the next important steps in your project are:

  • 24 V input and output ()
  • 0 to 10 V analog input
  • RS 485 and RS 232 interface

We can not use the actual IO configuration in industrial projects :wink:

Hello everyone,

A couple of months of die-hard labour further and we are pleased to announce the new version of Industruino. In this new version we have updated to a new LCD screen which uses the U8G library and also moved to a 4-layer board for improved signal quality. Please have a look at our website for more information: www.industruino.com We have also made a short movie introducing Industruino: First Industruino Introduction video (2013) - YouTube

@ Simone_550, Thank you for your feedback. I totally agree that this should be the next step. We first had to make sure we had a good base to work on, and that's exactly what we've done in the last couple of months. We will develop a number of boards that connect to Industruino which will offer a number of industrial I/O options and power regulation.

Best Regards,

Loic

Congrats! This is exacly what I was looking for for an energy meter project. :slight_smile:
In fact I was just looking for the case, but this will make me consider my design from scratch.

I don't know whats on your roadmap, but for my use case I would love to see some add-ons:
-220Vac to 5Vdc power supply, so that you can power the unit straight from the 220Vac
-Maybe a baseboard with an header interface capable of use regular shields already on the market.

  • Or shield's/modules combining uSD card with either Xbee/ Bluetooth or Electric IMP.

Keep up the good work.

btw-It's not clear from the site, the dimensions of the kit. How many DIN RAIL units does it take. Looks like 5, but not shure.

my suggestions :
make the base unit pretty much like you have it.
have a side connector for a second unit, IC2 or some such and allow a second unit to have dedicated parts.

if you look at any of the small PLC's on the market, they have one base unit, and then add-on units.

that keeps the main unit clean and gives everyone the option of stuffing the add-on with all the circuits they want.

I am looking for dimensional layout of the terminal board. that way, I can make my own for my needs.

Dave