Embedded computers

Keeping a closer eye on these infrastructures is necessary not only to prevent loss of revenue, but more importantly, loss of life. Unfortunately, however, communicating with remote sites to proactively prevent equipment degradation is far from an easy task and may even require a four-hour helicopter ride. In order to proactively monitor and control remotely located assets, users must be able to access local sensor data. The most cost-effective and intelligent way to do this is through cellular automation.

In addition to addressing more stringent security requirements, industrial users face the complexity of having multiple devices to manage and implement for an effective remote monitoring and control solution over IP. The challenge facing many customers is that, on top of their existing RTUs, they must also figure out which of many products they will require. It may be necessary to have a device for cellular connectivity, a Modbus gateway and a security (VPN) device, which is costly to deploy and complicated to administer and maintain.

These types of connections did not require the same stringent security standards that a cellular connection over an IP network does. Therefore, as customers migrate toward IP networking and data security is mandated, sourcing and implementing new technologies to support the increasing security demands becomes necessary.

For imaging applications that need to measure multiple colors, white LED lights have supplanted halogen and fluorescent lights for a number of reasons, including LEDs’ ability to offer a wider range of colors and varieties of “white” light, also referred to as the color temperature.

Color machine vision has its challenges.
Systems can produce three times the data (or less than one-third the resolution) of a monochrome camera solution. Color can introduce more potential sources for imaging errors, more complexity, more cost, and require careful engineering that reduces the system’s flexibility to deal with lines that make products of varying shape, colors, and size. In fact, if designers can find a way to use filters and lighting to measure a colored area using monochrome cameras, they usually do.

When customers come to JAI to discuss a color application, Kinney starts by asking what sort of spatial accuracy the system needs versus color accuracy. “It also depends on data rate,” he adds. “If you need absolute color accuracy of less than 1%, then we usually look at a three-CCD prism camera solution. If spatial accuracy over a wide inspection area is more important, then a very-high-resolution single-chip Bayer camera may be better. If you need high speed, CMOS offers higher frame rates and multi-line sensors with NIR capability and is very effective for high-speed printing applications where colorimetry measurements are very important because NIR can help you judge between true black ink and black made by combining cyan-magenta-yellow inks. And for some printing applications, knowing the difference is important for quality purposes.”

refer to:http://www.visiononline.org/vision-resources-details.cfm/vision-resources/Is-Your-Machine-Vision-System-Color-Blind/content_id/4333

Honeywell worked with the company to implement a Networking at its facility in Santiago, Chile. This center connects operating sites to essential facilities, creating a collaborative environment that is the key enabler for production improvement.

Operational Benefits: Expertise is centralized in a single, easy-to-staff location and was networking across multiple sites. The automation infrastructure, as well as applications such as advanced process control, can be deployed, maintained and optimized across mine operations with optimal efficiency and without requiring additional head count. The specific benefits of this project include:

Improved overall operational performance
Effective deployment of best practices and solutions across multiple mining facilities
Increased production throughput and copper recovery
Increased profit margins without major capital expansions
But What Really Matters: Similar to the aforementioned aluminum producer, this copper mining company improved operations using advanced process control. The challenge with any company that implements APC, though, is that they usually don’t have in-house expertise to sustain APC benefits as operating conditions of production targets change. Centralizing APC is a much more efficient method and allowed the mining company to sustain its APC benefits for the long term.

refer to:
http://www.automation.com/business-transformation-through-remote-collaboration-optimization-and-operations

“The Raspberry Pi and Beagle family have done a lot to bring new people into the world of embedded development, and that is a wonderful thing,” says Scott Garman, Technical Evangelist, Intel Open Source Technology Center. “As the embedded community grows and people seek out new projects to pursue, they are inevitably going to run into limitations on one platform or another. Just about every embedded board in the marketplace has something unique to offer, and the MinnowBoard will be a compelling choice for many applications, particularly those that require high I/O throughput.”

MinnowBoard is an Intel Atom-based platform equipped with interfaces like SATA, Gigabit Ethernet, and PCI Express, and is suited for applications such as Networking Attached Storage (NAS) and Network security, Garman says (Figure 3). “Professional embedded developers working on commercial products will like the fact that the MinnowBoard is open hardware, and can be customized without having to sign any Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDAs),” he adds.

refer to:

http://embedded-computing.com/articles/diy-pushes-open-hardware-kindergarten-kickstarter/

Many automation require that controls engineers log the data they gather. Regardless of whether this is done to follow certain laws and regulations, or simply as a feature of a particular product, the fact is that data must somehow be stored.

In the past, before modern automation, there were many ways to do this. People would be paid to go to each machine and write down the numbers on a clipboard. Chart recorders were utilized where appropriate. Sometimes data wasn’t recorded at all.

Meanwhile, big companies at the beginning of the information age wanted better ways to track things such as sales, inventory and accounting statistics. The development of databases, where large sets of data could be stored securely and retrieved reliably, changed the landscape of the workplace. Soon, employees punched their data into a computer, which in turn entered the data into the appropriate place in the database. Gone were the warehouses of file cabinets, replaced by server rooms. The emergence of widespread networking allowed people to make use of this stored treasure chest of data, resulting in an entirely new era of sales analytics and marketing tools.

refer to:
http://www.automation.com/leveraging-it-technology-for-industrial-controls-applications