Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Greetings

I am looking at controlling some devices in my system using small SBC cards (e.g., PC104) and/or embedded small form factor PCs. I'm not very familiar with the products available and was hoping to get some advice on this forum as to what products people are using, what pitfalls are out  there, and general experiences with similar setups. I'm not looking at doing anything fancy, just run a soft IOC on a linux system to control one or two devices. I only need the standard I/O (serial, USB, network, perhaps some DIO). It doesn't need to be exceptionally rugged, though it will be running 24/7 in a fairly warm and dusty room, and may be unplugged and moved around regularly.

I want good software support. To me that means it comes pre-installed with a standard, supported linux distribution and I can cross-compile EPICS more or less out-of-the-box without having to resort to a lot of four-letter words.

We tried doing this on a Raspberry Pi - works great, certainly for prototyping. Cross-compiled and ran easily. But I'm not sure I want to use a RPi in production (or maybe it is good enough? Opinions?).

Any product info, experiences, thoughts, and opinions are greatly appreciated.

Thanks
Mark

Mark Vigder
Control System Architect
Canadian Neutron Beam Centre