Hello!
I'm not an experimented programmer but I have played a while with this board and I think that I can use it to replace a control module from a machine. I'm talking about producing this machines with the control made with this board.
Anyone knows any kind of impediment to do this?
I'm referring, specially, to this points:
long term use
the producer of Arduino permits this????
... or if there is any other problem that I didn't think about...
If anyone has something to say about industrial using, please do it!
Haha, arduino in industrial use. Actually its really amazing when I look aroudn when visiting companies now. here adn there you can find the 1 guy who works for most companies that builds little rigs for them that run off of arduino to do simple automated tasks. When I first got into this I thought that they'd just be a little "hee hee, hobby fun" rig when my boss set me up with one. But now, I can see where they could be used EVERYWHERE.
And like kduin says, the ATmega line is ridiculously popular. Though PICAXE I've found quite a few more times since starting. When taking apart electronics, I've got a good stack of boards that I've been stealing components off of out of random things with atmega chips on them. I really should learn to burn a bootloader to them. Itd probably save me a bit of money on later projects that I don't want to use a full arduino in.
One of our engineers swears by the PIC micro and we have quite a few of them througout the plant handling various functions. I have been trying to sell him on the Arduino but he is afraid of the language. He has no background in C or any .net language for that matter. He is used to using PicBasic and doesn't want to switch. Ironically he was complaining the other day about the PIC's 2 Byte serial buffer. I did a mad scientist laugh and pointed out that the Atmel328 sports a whopping 64 Byte buffer. Muhahahahahaha!
He is also currently working on a personal project where he needs to be able to write comma delimited text files directly to a USB drive. This is something that the PIC does not natively support and since the community support for them is so much smaller than the Arduino, I was again was able to laugh maniacally and point him to the SD library.
If I am able to eventually talk him into using the Arduino (the nice thing for him is he can purchase one through the company) I am quite certain we will see these being used in new devices and very possibly replacing old ones as well.
. I did a mad scientist laugh and pointed out that the Atmel328 sports a whopping 64 Byte buffer
I don't quite know how to break this to you...
Back to the original subject, no reason not to use the Arduino, but make sure you protect the inputs and outputs, and that you understand liability law.
I think he means if you break it , we will all laugh at you. Basically if your project goes full scale then breaks due to the arduino , don't be expecting any money from the arduino group.
I think Arduino can save him from that if he uses it judiciously or utilises a similar board like OLIMEXINO-STM32 or Maple based on the same Arduino framework and support his project with hardcore processors while retaining the feel and programming environment of Arduino.
AWOL:
(...)
... and that you understand liability law.
What did you mean with this? Did I'm missing something?
Everything sold, if someone gets hurt using it or by it or possibly near it then what happens? When you do your testing, be sure and try all the things that are not supposed to be done with the machine. That's a blind spot for a lot of people but if the thing gets knocked over and goes into spastics that could in any way cause harm then you didn't do your job is what the lawyers will say.
As for MCU's and industry... look around, there are/were at least 2 serious trade rags with the word "embedded" in the title.
These chips are solid and if you get them in automotive grade (many have that available) then you get a 'harder' chip, working and storage environment-wise. Search for ATMEL doc7760.pdf.
You might even get a person to learn the machine code so they can proof the compiled code for the product, unless you're comfortable trusting the no-strings compiler. I guess that depends on how much money is in the product and how much the company is worth and might be why to stick with one chip line.
Check out running on stand-alone chips. These ATMELs have internal clocks so literally only power and ground is needed to have a running chip, the rest is for I/O (communication and sensing). Most all have regular and high speed forms of serial communication available, the big ones can do parallel without adding anything but the big ones probably cost more than $2 in quantity, LOL.
So much is available right on the Arduino site. I don't think that many new people really look at all from the questions they ask.
The little ones with 8 pins are the same speed but with trivial RAM, very capable of doing small things fast.
If you can do surface mount then the one on the Teensy++ has 40 pins and 4x the flash, ram and eeprom as 328P plus it is USB capable on the chip. I dunno what they cost though, can't be too much.
Or you can put more than one chip on a board of your own, they all have high speed bus for SPI/I2C/etc so they can coordinate through that or just pin to pin depending on your need.
Or you can multiply pins using serial to parallel shift registers (got some direct from China, 35 cents each) which is how some people drive massive led arrays with UNO's (and external power supply). Those shift registers can be daisy chained so with one pair of pins (or is it 3?) from one chip can feed bits to a lot of 8 or 16 bit outputs pretty quickly. Even a single Tiny can drive that.
Tell your boss the rabbit hole goes deep with no seeming end.
It certainly looks like it. The chip is listed as supported under AVR Libc. Arduino IDE uses AVR-Libc/GCC language but for every hardware setup (even different ISP) the IDE needs a hardware file and I know of none for 8535. I am sure it can be made.
For the moment, I'm making the prototype with ArduinoUno. When everything will be ok, I would like mo make something like a PLC. Is that I'm so interested to find a solution with a chip that is easy to program (with the method described here: http://hlt.media.mit.edu/?p=1695 but with much more pins).