How To identify right Industrial IoT Platforms

As per proprietary research by BCC research the Global IoT market is set to gain by $37 Billion by 2021. The research is focused on the endpoints particularly sensors as they are the critical start point for the IoT communications.  But the data collection platform is another decisive parameter in the IoT eco-system. This article will focus on How To identify right Industrial Iot Platforms and cover critical parameters which should be taken into account when identifying the right electronics hardware platform. There are plethora of evaluation boards, modules, chip-sets  hence it is important that all the requirements are taken into account and the platforms are chosen wisely as per the actual deployment and customer specific requirements.

Understanding the requirement 

First step in identifying right Industrial Iot Platforms is to understand the requirements in terms of various parameters. Below are few guidelines questions which should be asked to customers to get the right Industrial IoT Platforms requirement of the platform.

1. How many Sensors to be supported? Which in turn will give idea about GPIO lines.
2. Computing Power
3. Memory requirements
4. Is it node or gateway ?
   1. IoT node requirements are low power, long battery life
   2. IoT gateway requirements –
      1. Interfaces Required (Ethernet, WiFi, BT, Zigbee, Zwave, Sigfox, LoRa)
      2. Location – Outdoor, Indoor

Comparison of various embedded platforms

Below are some of the platforms features comparisons which can help the product designer and customers alike on understanding How To identify right Industrial IoT Platforms for their applications.

 Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+

• Application specific HATS board to be developed for RPI 3 boards will be required.
• Each board needs an SD Card as memory requirements are higher due to Linux OS support
• Power consumption requirement for the board is high as processor are 64Bit and running at high speed and need additional measures for thermal management of unit.

Raspberry Pi – Zero W

• Application specific HATS board to be developed for RPI Zero boards.
• Each board needs an SD Card as memory requirements for RPI Zero boards are quite high due to linux OS
• Power consumption requirement for the board is high as processor are 64Bit and running at high speed need additional measures for thermal management of unit.
• Overall cost of unit  would be higher considering additional cost of memory.

Orange Pi R1 

• Application specific base board  needs be develop.
• Being a quad core processor power consumption  requirements are higher and would add challenges in thermal management of Unit.

ARDUINO UNO REV3

Being a 8 bit uC, this embedded platform has limitations for Industrial IoT application and  RTOS should be ported as per product application. It is cost effective solution for small memory footprint requirements.

NUCLEO-F303K8

• Frequency  : 72MHz
• Microcontroller  : 32 bit ARM Cortex
• Flash Memory :  512 Kbytes
• SRAM  : 16 kb
• Crystal Oscillator  : 4-32MHz
• ADC  : 40 channels
• DMA  : 12 channels
• GPIO  : 115
• Operating Voltage  : 2 to 3.6 volt
• Digital I/O 2x 12 bit DAC channel, 4x 12 bit A/D converters,14x timers, 4x Hardware SPI,3x I2C interface, 5x USART, CAN, USB2.0 full-speed interface with LPM support
• 32bit  architecture
• Low cost
• Low power requirement

There are plethora of evaluation platforms in the market, cost, performance, battery life and many other parameters should be considered when advising the clients about the right Industrial IoT platform. It has to be unique and custom designed so that BOM overheads can be reduced without compromising on quality or functionality and should be sustainable for long term.

Argus Embedded System is  Industry’s leading company in providing electronic product design and Electronics Manufacturing for Security, Home and Industrial automation, Medical, Transport & Logistics, Automotive, Networking, Telecom, IoT and  Connected devices. Our IoT Product line can help you in defining and designing any of your product ideas.

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