Compact, Rugged PC Connects the Industrial Floor to the Cloud

For Emerson, the future of the industrial PC (IPC) is all about flexibility. Both the hardware and the software inside it must be adaptable, universal, and scalable to handle the complexities of the industrial IoT (IIoT).

Emerson has introduced a new compact, rugged industrial PC specifically designed for machine and parts manufacturing plants. The PACSystems IPC 2010 runs industrial-grade Linux, and it incorporates serial (a single port for RS-232) and Ethernet (dual ports for 10, 100, 1000BASE-T) connectivity so it can be used as a communications gateway in various topologies. Based on a dual-core Arm Cortex-A53 CPU clocked at up to 1.2 GH, it also has the computational power to double as an edge computing system. Emerson said the rugged PC can also be implemented as a flexible protocol converter or play a wide range of other roles in industrial IoT, edge computing, OT/IT convergence, HMI visualization, and SCADA connectivity.

The embedded PC features the broadest operating temperature range of any passively cooled industrial PC in its class and runs on only 4 W of power overall, Emerson said. On top of its compact and robust packaging that measures 120 x 45 x 101 mm, the system adds soldered memory (2 GB of DDR4 DRAM that operates at up to 1600 MHz) and a large amount of internal storage (64 GB eMMC). The IPC features a single Micro SD slot to plug in additional storage. A single DisplayPort interface via the USB-C connector is also under the hood.

Emerson said the industrial-grade PC is ideal for handling the huge amounts of data pumped out by all the programmable logic controllers, cameras, sensors, and other systems in modern factories. It is tightly integrated with its industrial edge platform, PACEdge. This software environment unites all the tools required to collect, store, process, secure, display, and integrate data that can then be used for remote monitoring, preventative maintenance, and the like. The software stands out for its ability to integrate the OT and IT domains—without disrupting safety-critical OT systems or IT security, communications, and applications.

The rugged PC also supports parts of its next-gen SCADA software for manufacturing, Movicon.NEXT. All these software building blocks help users run applications quickly using browser-based configuration, enabling customers to do customized data collection and aggregation, data protocol conversion, and data analytics applications to optimize and visualize operations in real-time. Emerson said several other platforms, including its Movicon Connext and WebHMI software, can be activated or loaded into it at any time.

William Paczkowski, head of product management for the IPC in Emerson’s discrete automation unit, said all these features add up to “a pre-packaged and economical solution” for industrial digital transformation. Further out, Emerson said it plans to integrate the new industrial IPC into a wider range of offerings for leak detection, compressed air monitoring, batching systems, cloud services, and many other packaged solutions.