Low-Cost Industrial Controller based on the Raspberry Pi Platform

Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs) still are the state-of-the-art regarding the industrial automation control, but the Industry 4.0 advent is imposing new requirements, e.g., related to the capability to acquire and process data on realtime at the edge computational layer. On the other hand, the current availability of cheaper and more powerful processors opens new windows to develop low-cost and more advanced industrial controllers aligned with the Industry 4.0 principles. In this context, an important challenge is to improve the current state-of-the-art PLCs by taking into consideration the low-cost but powerful computational boards that will allow to embed IoT technologies and data analytics. This work describes the development of a low-cost but powerful industrial controller based on the use of the single-board computer Raspberry Pi, which allows executing logic control programs codified in IEC 61131–3, IEC 61499, or even in Java or Python, while maintaining the industrial requirements. The proposed platform was experimentally used to control an automation process based on a Fischertechniks platform.