Arduino OPTA PLC
When I heard about it the first time I was honestly a little surprised I mean. I know there have been initiatives to PLC if I arduinos earlier, but they have all been from third party vendors and not from Arduino themselves, but like a lightning bolt that struck down from the clear sky. The PLC Gods AK Arduino surprised me with not only announcing the Arduino PLC ID, which Ive done some videos about already, but they also announced their new Arduino opta plc. This is the first video in a series of two in this video. We will get a first impression of the hardware and in the second video we will hook this PLC to my development machine and connect it to the Arduino PLC ID to see what the difference is compared to when we were running the Arduino portenta machine control. In my previous video, a quick disclaimer Arduino sent this PLC to me so that I could do a video about it. No money has exchanged, hands and Arduino have not seen this video before you now that we have gotten that out of the way lets get started. Music, okay lets start with a simple and quick unboxing, so I got it in this box, its very small and very Spartan, I must say so – lets open it up on an instruction manual. So, interestingly enough, the first language is Italiano, so ciao amichi italiani, but we aint got time for that. Job now lets look at the device, so my initial Impressions is that this is a sturdy guy, its its really really sturdy.
It has no moving Parts whatsoever. No rotating fans, nothing so hopefully as little maintenance as possible for this guy. The Arduino PLC is a collaboration between Arduino and the company. Finder finder is on 1300 people, strong industrial and building automation, device manufacturer with Italian roots that has been doing relays and other industrial equipment for 70 years. It seems Arduino have done a very good decision here to partner with someone that has a lot of experience in this field. Interestingly enough, if you go to the finder website, they call the Arduino, opta or plr so programmable logic relay instead of PLC, which is interesting as we will soon look at the specifications of the PLC. This is understandable. The Arduino opta comes in three different variants: variant. 1 is the optolite which provides four high power relays, each rated for up to 250 volts ac 10 amps. So I hope thats visible here: eight configurable digital analog inputs, fieldbus integration through modbus TCP, usb c port for programming of the device. The second variant is the opta rs 485, which provides everything that the opta light provides plus rs485, which can be used for Fields, integration through modbus RDU, the third and last variant is called the opta Wi Fi, which is what we see here. This has everything that the opta RS 485 has plus Wi Fi and Bluetooth connectivity options that enables iot connectivity. Additionally, the following applies to all of these plcs, just like the Arduino portenta machine control.
All of these plcs are powered by a dual core MCU. One Core is running at 240 megahertz, while the other one is a more powerful running at 480 megahertz. All of these variants can be programmed using the Arduino PLC IDE, which supports all five languages of the ISE 61131 3 standard. Ive made another video about my initial impressions of the IDE, which is available in the link above on top of running PLC code. You can simultaneously run traditional Arduino sketches on the PLC for maximum flexibility. Just like most other Arduino boards. You can connect the Arduino PLC to their iot cloud, so thats it for this episode. In the next part, we will hook this guy up to the Arduino PLC. Ide write some code, compile it and upload some software to this guy.