Fairly confident that arduino can do this, but just want to confirm before spending money.
I want to take four analogue voltage measurements, in the 100 - 500 Hz range, filter (low-, high-, or band-pass), and potentially average them, before performing some linear calculations, decimating the data and sending to a PLC through an analogue output (I think digital is also ok, but would rather keep it analogue). Ideally I'd like to do this in as real time as possible, but understand there will be delay with windowing and filtering.
"Arduino" can do this but the Arduino world nowadays include huge number of different boards.
If you need to output an analog value you rule out the AVR series of Arduinos (UNO, Mega2560, Leonardo and the like). Depending on the amount of filtering and other calculations you want to do "in real time" you need one of the faster models anyway. The SAMD21 based MKR series might do your job.
I'm a bit surprised that you want to send the result to a PLC. If you have a PLC in place why don't you do the calculations and filter in the PLC? Or the other way around, if you have an Arduino why do you think you need a PLC in addition?
I am looking at the portenta H7 or X8 as we have the budget, and we will likely have additional use cases that I think benefits having a more capable board. But yes I am aware that each board is different.
The reason for arduino is that this is primarily for testing (on a budget). If the testing goes well I want the option to be able to integrate into a PLC, but yes the primary plan is to then do all the calculations within the PLC. The inverse, having arduino replace an entire industrial PLC is not really feasible.
I want to read the voltages (likely actually going to be a 4-20 mA signal) to perform filtering and averaging. Nothing more at this stage. My main question was really just confirming the input to output signal issue.
As it sound like there are limitations on certain boards, is my assumption correct, that either the H7 or X8 can do this?
Siemens advertising seems to still work. There are two reasons PLCs still exist:
existing machine designs that depend on it
programmers which never learned to program with a real programming language
The later reason will be retired soon.
To my knowledge both boards doesn't offer an analog output pin. Both are offering features you probably don't need and use processor architectures seldomly used in the Arduino world, so community support might be limited.
For the described intention I recommend to use a SAMD21 based board.
