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Sense, Sort & Send Machine Data with Brainboxes Industrial Edge Controller

January 7, 2020Comments Off

Brainboxes industrial I/O modules and the recently released Industrial Edge Controller allow businesses to efficiently sense, sort, and send machine data; minimising costly downtime, speeding up response times and ultimately maximising profit.

Thermal Integration Ltd, a UK heating equipment manufacturer, went up against large incumbents to win the bid to design and install in a council-owned residential building in a London borough. The existing control panel was described as a “£250,000 on/off switch.” Thermal Integration were able to offer a new £5,000 panel that not only controlled the heating exchange but also allowed remote monitoring via a cloud-based application.

Compared to the PLCs traditionally used when reliable control, ease of programming, and real-time fault diagnosis is required, Richard Hanson-Graville, Technical Manager at Thermal Integration, discovered the products made by Brainboxes Ltd, alongside Raspberry Pi, allowed for a 70% reduction in his production costs. Describing the Brainboxes modules, he said, “The good thing is they’re compact, they’re reliable and you get a lot more in and out. It all works straight out of the box.”

Thanks to Brainboxes compact design; Thermal Integration were able to install a panel that hugely improves on its outdated bulky predecessor. Critically for a system suppling heat to a residential building; Raspberry Pi sends relevant sensor data, calculates performance, and sounds the alarm when anything goes wrong, ensuring the control panel is every bit as reliable as its expensive alternatives.

With the introduction of a browser-based dashboard, the system allows users to refer to live performance information to confirm for themselves how things are working. The transparency this provides is a game changer; eliminating the need for expensive engineer callouts. In the case of one elderly resident who complained that the heating in her flat was faulty; remote monitoring meant that it didn’t take a visit from an engineer to establish the problem: the heating simply hadn’t been switched on.

Thanks to the significant increase in their profit margin, Thermal Integration plan to roll out the smart heating system across London, with 11 future sites coming through. Their R&D team are building on the success of this first installation with their latest systems incorporating Brainboxes Industrial Edge Controller.

The BB-400 Edge Controller offers the flexibility of PC systems with open source programming options to make integration and customisation user friendly. An edge controller that can read inputs and control outputs, whilst communicating with remote systems; Brainboxes’ device could be the perfect automation solution for industrial applications.

The possibilities are only limited by the requirements of the system and the imagination of the system designer. Capabilities can be extended via Brainboxes module range to provide additional inputs/ outputs as needed, and out of the box integration with cloud platforms like Amazon’s AWS mean the sky really is the limit when it comes to expansion.

Traditionally; controllers designed for reliability in industrial environments offer limited programming options. On the other hand, more powerful processors, whilst making great prototyping boards, are rarely robust enough for the factory floor. The Brainboxes BB-400 offers the best of both worlds by combining connectivity with a Raspberry Pi Compute module and an Arduino, packaged together in a compact DIN rail compatible enclosure suitable for the harshest industrial environments.

Brainboxes Industrial I/O devices are controlled over ethernet using a range of protocols. The modules have a suite of software APIs available including for Visual Basic, C# and C++, which allows them to be controlled and monitored over a local network, internet as a web relay, or ethernet relay switch.