OnLogic Factor 201 Announced As The Raspberry Pi CM4 Fitted For Industrial Use-Cases

[phoronix]

Phoronix: OnLogic Factor 201 Announced As The Raspberry Pi CM4 Fitted For Industrial Use-Cases

The team at OnLogic is celebrating Pi Day today by announcing the Factor 201 as a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 built for industrial IoT use-cases...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=OnLogic-Factor-201

[cb88]

Get a caddilac Rpi .. or for half the money a 2x faster mini PC.

This should be $100 tops.

[stormcrow]

Get a caddilac Rpi .. or for half the money a 2x faster mini PC.

This should be $100 tops.

It's not built to replace a desktop PC. It's meant for low power, low heat signature solutions where a stock R-Pi alone is insufficient but a custom designed cap and case are adequate, but where a power hungry x86-64 chip is inappropriate. I can think of any number of use cases where this would be true.

SCADA coupled with/or autonomous data acquisition with small power budgets. Battery powered portable communications (no I don't mean cell phones). Heat sensitive industrial process controls, especially ones that are already using ARM control software.

To do the same thing with a PC that this thing does would require adding similar control interfaces plus the custom case and much larger battery and/or solar panel. This would raise the prices of the x86-64 solution considerably; you'd still end up with x86-64's power and heat problems. Intel industrial compute systems from reliable OEMs aren't cheap. It's likely the OnLogic product is solution and price competitive in the market it's placing itself.

My main concern if I were looking at this and other lower power ARM solutions, wouldn't be the cost. It would be how reliable the product is 1, 3, 5, 10 years from now. R-Pis aren't built for long term solutions. I'd hope this product solves some of the problems R-Pi has with storage corruption at least.

[cb88]

It's not built to replace a desktop PC. It's meant for low power, low heat signature solutions where a stock R-Pi alone is insufficient but a custom designed cap and case are adequate, but where a power hungry x86-64 chip is inappropriate. I can think of any number of use cases where this would be true.

SCADA coupled with/or autonomous data acquisition with small power budgets. Battery powered portable communications (no I don't mean cell phones). Heat sensitive industrial process controls, especially ones that are already using ARM control software.

To do the same thing with a PC that this thing does would require adding similar control interfaces plus the custom case and much larger battery and/or solar panel. This would raise the prices of the x86-64 solution considerably; you'd still end up with x86-64's power and heat problems. Intel industrial compute systems from reliable OEMs aren't cheap. It's likely the OnLogic product is solution and price competitive in the market it's placing itself.

My main concern if I were looking at this and other lower power ARM solutions, wouldn't be the cost. It would be how reliable the product is 1, 3, 5, 10 years from now. R-Pis aren't built for long term solutions. I'd hope this product solves some of the problems R-Pi has with storage corruption at least.

I'm 100% aware of the capabilities... and this is a dumb product at a terrible price point.

SCADA isn't going to use this as 100% never cares about power budget... certainly not 5w vs 15w... especially when the ARM solution performs worse. Even in solar powered systems this isn't enough to break the budget as most of the time the PC will likely be in sleep mode etc...

You realism X86 dominate the IPC market right ALREADY...din rail mounted mini PCs are a dime a dozen... its ARM that is attempting to poorly break into this market at a bad price point. And as you point out... IPCs are already reliable and if your Rpi gets corrupted it is automatically a worse solution.

[CochainComplex]

It's an industry product. There reliability, customer service and certification is prime not 100or300$. My company is also customer of onlogic....yes they almost exclusively use as rock Ind internally. Nothing expensive you could easily build it cheaper etc. But ask your boss if just looking up the parts individually and open new business accounts for the 5new Onlineshops required to get your bang for the buck list will justify the amount of cost generated of you and the involvement of the sales department. Later on what if it fails ? Who is going to disassemble it and find the issue? ....in business terms a few hundred bucks is nothing even for a raspi and still might be the cheaper solution on the long run.

For at home of course it's too expensive.

[cb88]

It's an industry product. There reliability, customer service and certification is prime not 100or300$. My company is also customer of onlogic....yes they almost exclusively use as rock Ind internally. Nothing expensive you could easily build it cheaper etc. But ask your boss if just looking up the parts individually and open new business accounts for the 5new Onlineshops required to get your bang for the buck list will justify the amount of cost generated of you and the involvement of the sales department. Later on what if it fails ? Who is going to disassemble it and find the issue? ....in business terms a few hundred bucks is nothing even for a raspi and still might be the cheaper solution on the long run.

For at home of course it's too expensive.

I mostly agree... and I do work in the industry (I actually work in industrial controls) I'm going to buy the x86 part almost every time just because I can do more with it... and its more compatible with a wider range of software as well as having higher specs. I'd have to be seriously cost cutting and not have any options to consider this particular one... and if I were at that point I probably would build a custom case with standard RPi integrated rather that theirs for 1/5th the cost or less.

This particular part just amounts to if you put it on the shelf it will sell (aka if you build it they will come).

[torsionbar28]

I mostly agree... and I do work in the industry (I actually work in industrial controls) I'm going to buy the x86 part almost every time just because I can do more with it... and its more compatible with a wider range of software as well as having higher specs. I'd have to be seriously cost cutting and not have any options to consider this particular one... and if I were at that point I probably would build a custom case with standard RPi integrated rather that theirs for 1/5th the cost or less.

This particular part just amounts to if you put it on the shelf it will sell (aka if you build it they will come).

Anyone talking about "building custom cases" vs. a low dollar COTS solution like this doesn't work in the target industry. And anyone concerned about a $300 line item also doesn't work in the target industry. This is not a product for school students, hobbyists, indigents, etc.

[cb88]

Anyone talking about "building custom cases" vs. a low dollar COTS solution like this doesn't work in the target industry. And anyone concerned about a $300 line item also doesn't work in the target industry. This is not a product for school students, hobbyists, indigents, etc.

What nonsense are you spouting... if I already have to have a Delrin CNC case routed for *insert other hardware here*.... its trivial to include mounting for an RPi... so yeah whatever.

Lots of companies throw money around in industrial controls for no reason ... just so happens my company doesn't tend to do that. We build something low cost that works long term reliably... end of story. If you need 200 RPis for some industrial application you certainly arent'going to be buying these... and the PC that manages them all probably isn't going to be an RPi either... so frankly this is a product without a market.

[CTTY]

Does it support Secure Boot/Verified Boot?

[CochainComplex]

I mostly agree... and I do work in the industry (I actually work in industrial controls) I'm going to buy the x86 part almost every time just because I can do more with it... and its more compatible with a wider range of software as well as having higher specs. I'd have to be seriously cost cutting and not have any options to consider this particular one... and if I were at that point I probably would build a custom case with standard RPi integrated rather that theirs for 1/5th the cost or less.

This particular part just amounts to if you put it on the shelf it will sell (aka if you build it they will come).

In this case I also mostly agree. I work in science. We use their range for measuring devices (very small series mostly one of its kind devices) so you just need one or max a few of them. Once you have a series of as you said 200 different "diy" solutions might be worth considering.