Industry Microcontroller Board

[pyb]

I am a big fan of the Particle Photon.  It is a very rugged and well tested iot device that is already being used in commercial and industrial applications.  It uses a solid STM32 microcontroller with a lot of memory and processing power.  However, the Particle firmware consumes 90% of the memory.  The Photon also has wifi, which makes it a security liability if wifi is not needed.

Is there an industry ready microcontroller board out there similar to the photon, but without wifi and running a basic RTOS?  I know there are many development boards like the Arduinos, Launchpads, and ESP32's, but these are all specifically for development and not end products.  I would just like a powerful microcontroller on a PCB that is ready to be programmed and used in an end product.

[rstofer]

I'm not sure I'm answering the right question...

How about the original LPC1768 mbed board.  It comes in a 'stamp' footprint just like the Arduino but it's a MUCH more capable processor.  It's not required but there is an online toolchain so you don't have to install anything locally.

https://os.mbed.com/platforms/mbed-LPC1768/

When I need more horsepower, this is my favorite board.

[pyb]

The MBED boards look awesome, and would be exactly what I need if they were not specifically meant for prototyping.  I am wanting to be able to provide embedded solutions without having to design my own hardware.  I would just like a board that is ready for an enclosure that is ready to go with I2C and ethernet.  Are the MBED boards used only for prototyping?

Using the MBED board for a prototype, what would be the next step?  Would I have to design my own stamp or feather style board?  Ideally I could find something ready to go off the shelf and then just worry about the enclosure and the software for the finished control solution. 

[krho]

Most of mbed/stm etc development boards are just that. The development boards. The STM for example specifically forbids you to use them as a part of a product you are going to sell. For others please look at the docs/search around.

[donotdespisethesnake]

I am wanting to be able to provide embedded solutions without having to design my own hardware.

I think that's impossible... you will need to do at least some custom design, if only plug in modules, and mechanical work to fit the module to a box, apertures for switches/LEDs, custom button membrane etc.

There are many industry ready boards, there is a huge market for SBCs and modules, but you need to order in industry quantities. e.g. https://www.embeddedarm.com/products/category/single-board-computers In that case, you can often order custom changes anyway. If you are looking for "industry ready" but "dev board price", you can probably forget that, although Olimex are probably closest to providing more industrial quality boards.

[pyb]

Thanks for the suggestions.  I guess what I am confused with is the hardware side of going from prototype to product.  It looks like Olimex provides the gerbers for their boards.  It is as "simple" as taking the gerbers and ordering your own boards?  And then a more advanced approach would be to alter the gerbers to exactly fit your needs?

[Bassman59]

Thanks for the suggestions.  I guess what I am confused with is the hardware side of going from prototype to product.  It looks like Olimex provides the gerbers for their boards.  It is as "simple" as taking the gerbers and ordering your own boards?  And then a more advanced approach would be to alter the gerbers to exactly fit your needs?

If you are considering “altering the Gerbers to exactly fit your need,” you should stop now, and instead do the full design from schematics in your preferred CAD package. Then you have the functionality of that board plus whatever specialist stuff your design needs, and you eliminate connectors and other costs.

This is the crux of a previous discussion.

[NorthGuy]

And then a more advanced approach would be to alter the gerbers to exactly fit your needs?

If the board you need is relatively simple (2-layer, nothing too fast, not too many components), then designing your own board (from scratch, not from Olimex gerbers) right away is the best idea. You'll get exactly what you want, possibly cheaper than off-the-shelf board. It is not hard to do.

[rstofer]

I just plug the mbed into a daughter card with all the extra goodies.  I consider it a 'feature' since I can take the processor out if necessary.  I don't have the part number but I just install some stacking headers in the daughter card and when the mbed is in place it looks pretty professional.  It looks 'planned'...

A couple of comments make it sound like designing a PCB is a walk in the park.  I have never found that to be true.  It's a huge PITA and likely to wind up with one or more errors.  It is not uncommon to have to make a couple of passes through the design before it is right.  It get truly ugly if you have to have impedance matched traces or length matching.  DDR memory would be a real problem.  Isolating analog from digital or digital from power and so on...

The learning curve for Eagle or KiCad is much steeper than I want to deal with.  I use the rather primitive software from ExpressPCB but it lacks an autorouter.  Autorouting is nice!

With the original mbed (LPC1768) all you need to add for Ethernet is a MagJack.  There is a TCP/IP library available based on lwIP - an industry standard TCP/IP protocol stack.

[pyb]

So what are the legal requirements for using the  LPC1768 in an end product that is meant solely for Industry.  At the end of the day, I want a custom embedded application but I do not want to get submerged on the software side.  National Control Devices makes some very nice boards that can be used in an end product, I just need to add a capable microcontroller.  The Photon works great, and is not licensed solely as a prototype board.  I do not see any prohibitive licensing on the LPC1768; it looks like they simply do not take any responsibility if used in an end product.  Any comments on this would be greatly appreciated.  Is it common for the LPC1768 to be used in an end product?

[rstofer]

The LPC1768 is an ARM chip, nothing more.  The mbed is a board that, among other things, contains an LPC1768.  There are a number of boards with the mbed interface which primarily means drag-and-drop device programming.

https://os.mbed.com/platforms/

It was easier to talk about mbed when there was only one board and it used the LPC1768.  Now there are dozens and they use all kinds of uCs.  ST makes a bunch of compliant boards.

I don't know who makes the LPC1768 mbed board.  mbed was a separate organization until they were absorbed by ARM.

AFAIK, the software libraries are all open source and that is both good news and bad depending on the license model.  If you want to use open source libraries, you have to go along with the conditions.  You can also buy a commercial toolchain (Rowley, Keil, etc) and develop your software without the open source implications.

I went to the mbed.org site and I don't see anything about licensing.  All it talks about is prototyping.  I suspect they assume that everybody will want to build a custom board and incorporate the features of mbed as they see fit.  That doesn't mean they don't license the board, it just means I didn't see the terms.

https://os.mbed.com/handbook/mbed-Microcontrollers

The link tends to talk about software licensing:

https://os.mbed.com/search/?q=licensing
 
You could post a question on the board or write to ARM.

[pyb]

I am just suprised that there is not an industry standard way for doing making a custom embedded solution without having to have custom hardware.  It seems like the IOT era is making this feasable for WIFI enabled devices, but all I can find for standard hardware are development boards, though the ARM MBED boards look to be the most promising.

[NorthGuy]

I am just suprised that there is not an industry standard way for doing making a custom embedded solution without having to have custom hardware.  It seems like the IOT era is making this feasable for WIFI enabled devices, but all I can find for standard hardware are development boards, though the ARM MBED boards look to be the most promising.

PLCs are designed for this. They're designed for people who cannot design their own and cannot program. You can assemble big complex circuits on DIN rails without using any custom components. The programming is totally graphical. The result is bulky and overpriced, but people use them anyway. I don't know if PLCs are still being developed.

[westfw]

Also pc104.
Adafruit and sparkfun, rabbit, and many more sell a wide variety of boards aimed at such applications, but I doubt that you’ll find anything “industry standard”, just because in industry the standard is to design your own board.

[funkathustra]

I am just suprised that there is not an industry standard way for doing making a custom embedded solution without having to have custom hardware.  It seems like the IOT era is making this feasable for WIFI enabled devices, but all I can find for standard hardware are development boards, though the ARM MBED boards look to be the most promising.

What would that even look like, though? Every product has vastly different MCUs and peripheral arrangements (and power sources!). The "hard" stuff (relatively speaking) is designing and interfacing with the application-specific circuitry. The "easy" stuff is the microcontroller PCB layout.

If you're talking about having industry-standard microcontroller "base boards" that you plug into your application-specific design, you've done nothing to eliminate the hard (and application-specific) work; all you've done is built a yet-another-dev-board that breaks out the microcontroller to some pins. That's stuff that any competent electronics engineer can design in her sleep.

Note that if we're talking IoT-based products that are running Linux, there's substantial work to building out a design with an application processor and RAM. But — free market to the rescue — many vendors provide SoM (system-on-module) solutions that are essentially processor daughter cards that you solder or snap into your application-specific design. So, in many cases, that's already a thing.

Now if you're talking about a general-purpose board that has all the peripherals on it and can be used for anything, how on earth could you ever make a "standard" microcontroller board, when there is no "standard" IoT product? Touchscreen coffee makers, surveillance systems, and low-power sensor networks are examples of vastly different IoT products with vastly different hardware.

I think you need to think a bit more about the diversity of what an "IoT Product" looks like — and the diversity of hardware designing that goes into that — before you question why we bother designing hardware instead of just standardizing around one solution.

[Sal Ammoniac]

The STM for example specifically forbids you to use them as a part of a product you are going to sell.

I don't believe such a provision would be enforceable, at least in the United States. If you buy a piece of hardware, you're free to use it any way you want as long as you're not making copies of the hardware. If anyone knows of a law that prevents this use, I'd like to hear about it. Even if the board contains copyrighted code, the First Sale Doctrine should cover this case. IANAL, so YMMV.

[bson]

Tern (http://tern.com/) used to be popular for all kinds of industrial applications, but I don't think they ever made it out of the x86 era.

[andersm]

The STM for example specifically forbids you to use them as a part of a product you are going to sell.

I don't believe such a provision would be enforceable, at least in the United States. If you buy a piece of hardware, you're free to use it any way you want as long as you're not making copies of the hardware.

I would assume it's about indemnity. If you build a product around their board, and it melts your customer's face, it's your problem, not theirs.

[Doctorandus_P]

Search Ali / Ebay / China for "FX2N".

These are boards with (clones of) Mitsubishi PLC's.
On board they have:

- Common mode filter in the power supply.
- SMPS (LM2576)
- Opto coupler inputs.
- Opto coupler outputs with relays or power transistors.
- Indicator leds on inputs and outputs.
- STM32F103xxx (Size depends on model).
- RS232 ( My board has Sipex SP232EEN).
- RS485 ( My board has Ti 75176 (Not very robust, and no extra protection.)
- Sturdy connectors.

There are a lot of variants of these boards.
- Different I/O size.
- Different Processor size.
- Different Connectors.
- Bare PCB or housing (with DIN-rail mount).
- Some have RTC backup battery.
- Some have opto isolators for RS232 / RS485.
- Some have 2 (blue) potentiometers near the Power connector / uC.

I have not plugged power onto the bord I bought some time ago (First want to get more familiar with STM32) but the board I have seems to have an un populated 0.1" header for the programmer.
It probably also has a program in it wit the PLC firmware, but who cares?

Because of all these differences prices vary from < EUR20 to around EUR100.
To give you some Idea of the hardware, the board below (random picture) costs EUR35.

[Doctorandus_P]

Just had a peek at "particle photon".
In my previous post (FX2N) I got carried away by the word "industrial" in your first post.
I do not understand why this "particle photon" would be worthy of the word "industrial".
It just seems one of the very many small development boards.

If you want a board of similar size without the WiFi you can look for:
- "Blue Pill" (STM32F103C8T6.Magic word: STM32duino ).
- "Maple Mini" ( Somewhat bigger STM32 as the "blue pill").
- "Teensy" ( AVR and ARM variants: https://www.pjrc.com/)

As mentioned before, for other ARM boards, have a look at the mbed site.
the mbed platform supports > 100 different boards from a bunch of different manufacturers.
https://os.mbed.com/platforms/
Mbed is (or used to be) "cloud" (more like mist) based. However, Platformio also supports the mbed framework and (after installation) it runs without internet connection and you keep control over your code.

I have hardly seen any atempt at standardisation. Everybody has their own standard
The UEXT connector might be worth mentioning. It bundles I2C / UART / SPI and Power in a 10 pin 0.1" header, but lacks gpio pins. https://www.olimex.com/Products/Modules/UEXT/

[Sal Ammoniac]

How do you define "industry ready"? I'm assuming you mean something that you can take and directly integrate into a commercial product. But why? PCB design and manufacture these days is so easy and cheap that I don't see the appeal of using an existing board as part of a new design, unless the volumes are so low that making a custom board isn't justified. Can you explain why you want to do this?