Schwabach, March 2013. Unified Automation provides an evaluation edition of the ANSI C based OPC UA Server SDK (Software Development Kit) together with an enhanced tool chain including OpenSSL for the Raspberry Pi. Therefore all functions of the OPC technology itself and all features of the Unified Automation Toolkit can be tested on an affordable hardware platform based on an ARM-CPU. The software includes an example implementation for the new IO add-on board Pi Face. Evaluation regarding size and speed can be performed, as well as OPC UA modeling and effective prototyping in data source implementation.
Originally the credit-card sized single board computer (SBC) was developed by the Raspberry Pi Foundation to provide students a cheap hardware platform. Students of computer science shall be encouraged to experiment and they should find an easy entry into programming of embedded systems. The Model B comes with a 700 MHz ARM11 processor (Broadcom BCM2835) and 512 MB RAM, and it includes a 10/100 MBit Ethernet connector. By this it is perfectly suited for building distributed systems, interlinked controllers and communication gateways. There are different Linux derivates as operating system available. The Raspberry Pi Model B is available for just 50 $ and the Pi Face add-on module having 8 digital Inputs and 8 digital Outputs, 4 micro switches and 2 relays is available for 40 $ at your standard electronics supplier (e.g. Farnell, RS-Components).
“Today’s students are the engineers of tomorrow and we want on the on side to sensitize young academics for the important topic ‘secure communication technologies’. And on the other side this new port should create new impulse in the development of embedded systems and their connectivity with industrial standards in the area of M2M and Industry 4.0”, says Jürgen Boxberger, Executive Director at Unified Automation GmbH. “The Raspberry Pi platform also perfectly suits our customers, they can easily evaluate and test our cross platform development tools and OPC UA products.”
The new Raspberry port is a precompiled binary package, like all other evaluation editions of Unified Automation, and it is available on request from our sales department. Even though the runtime is limited to one hour, all examples regarding data provider and OPC UA address space modeling are contained in source code and can be enhanced and modified for evaluation purpose.
Raspberry Pi is a trademark of the Raspberry Pi Foundation.
