Drives and Controls Magazine
Home
Menu
Open-source Arduino platform releases its first micro-PLC at SPS
Published:  21 November, 2022

Arduino, the open-source hardware and software microcontroller developer, announced its first industrial micro-PLC with industrial IoT capabilities at the recent SPS exhibition in Germany. The Opta controller has been developed in collaboration with the industrial component manufacturer Finder and is aimed at PLC engineers, offering them a scalable architecture based on a secure, high-performance, open-source platform that does not lock them into particular vendors. The PLC supports the standard LD (ladder) and FBD (function block) programming languages.

Arduino says that the Opta’s onboard connectivity and machine learning capabilities will opens up new opportunities for industrial automation at a relatively low cost.

The PLC’s dual-core Cortex M7 processor is powerful enough for real-time operations and predictive maintenance. It can be combined with load cells or vision systems to manage manufacturing flows on production lines.

The Opta will be available from next month in three variants, with prices starting from around €120:
• the Opta Lite, with onboard Ethernet and USB-C programming ports;
• the Opta RS-485, which adds an RS-485 half-duplex interface; and
• the Opta Wi-Fi, which adds Wi-Fi and Bluetooth Low Energy links.
All models support over-the-air updates and offer data security from the hardware to the cloud.

Arduino’s PLC was developed in conjunction with Finder

Four relays can each switch loads of up to 2.3kW.

Arduino:  Twitter  LinkedIn  Facebok