Asking for an industrial board

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I am an embedded software engineer at Codintek, a Telecommunications company raised in Tunisia that aims to design and develop transmission systems as well as IoT end-to-end solutions for agriculture uses.

The current project I am working on is a cow feeding system made out of a PCB board (with STM32 MCU) and multiple sensors to detect and feed the cows (RFID reader, Motor, Encoder etc…). The feeding process/algorithm is implemented on a Raspberry pi 4 board, directly connected to the STM32 via CAN bus, and it contains the database, history, and the web application that gathers all the details of the cows. (three applications, started as Linux services: Controller service (C++ application for controlling feeding process), AGPRO service (Web Full-Stack JavaScript application for interfacing all the details of the cows and communicating with the other service via MQTT), and finally My-SQL service)

Since the Raspberry Pi is not an industrial board, we are actually looking to replace it with another industrial board that supports the same features. A LoRa-2.4GHz-onboard transceiver is a benefit because we also want to replace the CAN protocol with LoRa communication.

Could you kindly recommend a board that is both affordable and powerful enough to fulfill our demands for this project?

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Hi Amir,

Welcome back :slight_smile:

At the moment it might be hard to find a full Linux capable SoC with those capabilities available in high QTYs.

Connectivity wise I’d have a look at the LoPy4 it has an onboard LoRa/LoRaWAN radio, and an ESP32 which gives WiFi and Bluetooth capabilities.
Since its a microcontroller you might not be able to run all of the applicatoins on the LoPy directly but if you send them to a ‘gateway’ or central computer that can run all of the heavier tasks.

PS: To get started you’ll also need an expansion board and antenna kit for LoRa

Liam

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It’s not like that Raspberry pi is a big No-No for industrial applications. With proper enclosure and cooling system, it can be used for industrial projects too. The main factor to consider is the temperature of the working environment.

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