From my experience doing IT in industrial manufacturing, there is a ton of room for them to replace expensive PLCs where they aren't really needed. The company that makes the big fancy automated machines also make the simpler auxillary ones that supplement their main offerings. Since they know how to build with PLCs, that's what they use instead of sticking a Pi or some small form PC in it instead. Stuff like barcode readers on a manufacturing line or some simple piece of QA equipment at the end of the line measuring the height of a bottle or something. Adds thousands of dollars to the BoM but is complete overkill.
> From my experience doing IT in industrial manufacturing, there is a ton of room for them to replace expensive PLCs where they aren't really needed.
From my experience with PLCs, they are hardened and robust to the extreme degree required by the harsh environments in which they are used. Last time I looked, the R Pi was the complete opposite. It can be crashed by just a nearby camera flash, and then leave its SD card corrupt to boot. Fine for hobbyists (apparently). Not fine for industrial applications.
Right, I'm not suggesting they replace critical PLCs. They are overused in places where those requirements aren't necessary just because PLCs are what their engineers know.
There's strong diminishing returns in this sort of growth. With anything, you can optimize it until you can't. The market requires you to grow forever. How will Raspberry Pi Ltd still be growing in 50 years when the entire orchard of low hanging fruit is long since picked barren?
I've started seeing PI show up on the DIN rails in some industrial equipment, usually HID related. PLCs are built to safety critical standards, a PI with some error might go executing code off into never-never land, where a PLC will fail to a known output state. Obvious oversimplification.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safety_integrity_level
> From my experience doing IT in industrial manufacturing, there is a ton of room for them to replace expensive PLCs where they aren't really needed
Just for fun try to find a way to get a Pi mounted up to a DIN rail with an enclosure that can resist industrial vibration and has good particulate penetration/filtering and ruggedized connectors. Good luck finding accessories that aren't 3D printed with materials that will break down when coated in machine oil or in direct sunlight.
Now try to figure out how to get whatever monster you built installed in an ISO 9001 or AS 9100 shop.
Again, I'm not talking about machinery that actually needs PLCs, I get that. A lot of stuff doesn't have vibrations, temperature, safety issues etc. but is built around PLCs out of tradition and BoM reasons.
"Here's our end of the production line fan that blows dust off of your product for $4k because we used a PLC." There is lots of stuff like that that just has no business using a PLC.
I (thank god) got out of manufacturing IT around 2000 but I still have friends working in that industry. A guy I know makes an absolute fortune frankensteining old MFM drives together and fixing resistors on 10base-T network cards because someone thought the exact same thing and subbed out a PLC for a computer to save a few bucks.
Trust me, I loathe PLCs, but Allen Bradley will still sell you a drop in replacement for something the now retired previous guy put in service 15 years ago.
Yeah I'm out of it now too. You still have the same issues running PLCs. I've had to find old ass network cards on EBAY. I understand why PLCs are used. I turned down a project building a machine using Arduino's and raspberry Pi's because it was inappropriate for the application. But there is definitely a subset of manufacturing equipment that doesn't require PLCs. I've already seen it happening scanning networks and seeing devices show up with RPi MACs.
