Called ‘PiXtend Pi 4’, at 1.5GHz they will be the fastest of the company’s Pi-based PLCs.
“The main field of application of the electronic control based on the Raspberry Pi is in device and machinery construction,” according to the company. “PiXtend Pi 4 comes with the Broadcom BCM2711 – the most powerful processor of the Raspberry Pi Foundation. The quad-core Arm Cortex A72 64bit SoC supports up to 8Gbyte of RAM.”
The controllers come in a Basic or Pro versions (see image – note, both were labelled ‘Pro’ in the image sent to Electronics Weekly, clarification has been requested), and have the Pi 4 on one of two expansion boards inside DIN rail-mount aluminium cases, with passive heatsinking for 1.5GHz operation.
Interfaces include the Pi 4’s own Gigabit Ethernet, which will “impresses with its high-performance” said Kontron, and its two micro-HDMI ports with support up to 4Kp30 video with audio. There are also two USB 2.0 ports and two USB 3.0 ports.
Connectors on the expansion boards are industry-grade, said Kontron, and expand the IO system for digital and analogue sensors and actuators, including connection via Modbus.
They can be programmed in languages including C or Python, and are suitable for use with the CodeSys’ SoftPLC.
