Open-source computers arrive for monitoring and control

Don't stop us if you've heard this one. "One of our co-op students this summer was looking for the Raspberry Pi he was using to set up an HVAC damping system, and asked the 25 people at our daily huddle," says Sandra Buffett, P.Eng., founder and CEO at Jordan Engineering Inc., a CSIA-member system integrator in Niagara, Ontario. "After the huddle, one guy asked, 'What's this pie everyone's talking about?' "        

(Cue drum-and-cymbal.) Ba-dum, chhh!

While unfamiliar terms are quickly cleared up, learning new concepts and technologies usually takes longer. Even those in-the-know at Jordan aren't all Raspberry Pi experts yet. "We began learning about it when one of our chemical compounding clients put one on the back of a wall-mounted TV monitor with an Ethernet jack and WiFi to display alarms and notifications on their plant floor," says Buffett. "This let them go from a typical LED display scrolling text, and upgrade to more graphics, colors and maybe dashboards, and gain those capabilities with less expense."

Buffett reports some of Jordan's engineers bought a couple of Raspberry Pi kits and adapters two years ago, started playing with one, and gave the other away at one of its annual automation workshops. "We're very relationship-based, and we partner with our clients for a long time," explains Buffett. "We've been holding our workshops for the past 14 years. They usually include staff presentations and project demos, and give everyone a chance to sit down and swap useful information. This past May, we did workshops in three cities for the first time, and gave away Raspberry Pis to 150 clients with help from Schneider Electric Canada, which has been a close partner for 18 years."

During the workshops, Schneider Electric conducted a lab for attendees to explore Raspberry Pi. "To open their minds to its possibilities, groups at each table came up with different ideas about how to use Raspberry Pi, such as monitoring the weather, energy prices, interest rates and inventory costs, which could empower their operators by helping them make better decisions on the best times to make their products," adds Buffet. "Our co-op student completed the design of his demo project to dampen the HVAC system in a two-story house, and deliver more heat to the lower floors in winter and more cooling to upper floors in summer.

"We're not using Raspberry Pi on plant floors or for critical or safety controls. It's best for monitoring and non-critical functions right now, and making small improvements you couldn't do otherwise. Many users like us have little applications that used to be prohibitively expensive to monitor and control. Well, now we can do them. We don't think of Raspberry Pi as taking away from PLCs and DCSs because it can also do monitoring and provide alerts to them."

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