<story><title>Arduino unveils the Opta – “Micro PLC” for industrial IoT</title><url>https://www.hackster.io/news/arduino-unveils-the-opta-its-first-micro-plc-for-the-industrial-internet-of-things-d97f1d6b868a</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>gw98</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t get the market position of this.&lt;p&gt;A number of Chinese companies produce DIN rail mounted PLCs which already cover this market, cost virtually nothing and actually emulate Mitsu GX ones so work with existing off the shelf tools and have the same real time guarantees as the commercial units. If you&amp;#x27;re going to cheap out, these are fine.&lt;p&gt;But this isn&amp;#x27;t the problem. The expensive bit of a PLC is the dude perma-welded to the cabinet. Last thing people want to do is rock the boat by expanding the risk to a vendor like Arduino, which quite frankly doesn&amp;#x27;t have a great reputation or history of tested industrial or reliable hardware. It&amp;#x27;s better to pay 3x as much for a well established vendor.</text></comment>
<story><title>Arduino unveils the Opta – “Micro PLC” for industrial IoT</title><url>https://www.hackster.io/news/arduino-unveils-the-opta-its-first-micro-plc-for-the-industrial-internet-of-things-d97f1d6b868a</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>DannyBee</author><text>I do a &lt;i&gt;lot&lt;/i&gt; of PLC work.&lt;p&gt;The Arduino IDE is totally unsuitable for it. No idea what they are doing about this.  It would take an amazing amount of work to fix this.&lt;p&gt;As for PLC functionality people actually use, the product page says &amp;quot;Optional support for standard IEC 61131-3 PLC languages&amp;quot;. This is what folks use for real. I presume this means &amp;quot;we didn&amp;#x27;t want to pay CodeSys but you can&amp;quot;. Or something.
That sucks.&lt;p&gt;Maybe they are relying on MBed support as their basic realtime story but, as mentioned, their dev environment is unsuitable for this kind of work.&lt;p&gt;There is no mention of expected scan time for ladders or guaranteed latency for anything else&lt;p&gt;So for the intended market, this doesn&amp;#x27;t look interesting so far. It seems like it will go the way of the x8 and land with a huge thud.&lt;p&gt;For a random person wanting an Arduino in a cabinet on a din rail, I can see maybe they&amp;#x27;d use it.</text></comment>