If you are a Gyro Gearloose who loves tinkering you will love this blog post. You know, although “suitable for industrial applications” is great and gives you guarantee that your device will work in rugged environments on the factory floor, it also means that there is unfortunately no possibility for “quick and dirty” connections of 5 V TTL signals or I2C sensors. If you as a maker can’t do without such connectivity you will love our easy and flexible solution for small money: The Arduino (&Co)-Connectivity!
Arduino, Genuino, Leonardo* and their manifold clones are popular single board computers which come with a super easy to use programming environment. They enable you to set up really rapid prototypes for measuring and controller applications. This simplicity is the main reason for their enormous popularity. These systems normally have pin headers which can be used to plug on so-called shields to accomplish many kind of IO-tasks. But there is a severe drawback: None of these boards would survive the rugged environments on the factory floor. On the other hand you can’t think of a Gyro Gearloose without thinking of Arduino.
As our RevPi Core doesn’t have such versatile pin headers we felt we should at least have an alternative solution for rapid prototype constructions. So we proudly present our “RevPi-Duino-driver”. After evoking this driver you can connect as many Arduinos (or clones) via USB. You simply click an USB cable in between RevPi Core and Arduino and you will get a cyclic data exchange between both devices. Of course you will also need to install a driver library on the Arduino. This is an open source Modbus RTU slave driver. The RevPi Core driver does cyclically exchange a configurable amount of data between Arduinos and the central process image. Arduino sketches may freely use this mirrored data. Our PiCtory configuration tool may be used to set up symbolic names for each installed Arduino. The individual devices are automatically detected by RevPi-Duino using VID, PID and serial number of the Arduino USB ports and will get their predefined offsets in the central process image.
We are looking forward to see your tinker projects using this combination of devices in our community. We KUNBUS people are actually tinkering using RevPi-Duino for a secret exhibition project (Shush!).
*Arduino, Genuino are registered trademarks of Arduino LLC / Arduino S.r.l.