Electronics Weekly Electronics Design & Components Tech News
Advantech has introduced a family of industrial wireless edge gateways built around various Arm processors, for protocol conversion and edge-to-cloud communication.
Jointly called ECU-1100, “these gateways feature wireless and Ethernet communication, multiple protocol support and WebAccess integration, and have specifically been designed for distributed solar power generation, electricity and energy management applications”, according to the company.
There are seven models:
- ECU-1051 – 2x LAN 2x COM Modbus/BACnet/101/104/DNP3/PLC/Azure/AWS IoT Gateway
- ECU-1251 – 2x LAN 4x COM Modbus/BACnet/101/104/DNP3/PLC/Azure/AWS IoT Gateway
- ECU-1152 – 2x LAN 6x COM Modbus/BACnet/101/104/PLC/Azure/AWS IoT Gateway
- ECU-150 – NXP i.MX8M quad core Cortex-A53, IoT Gateway with 2x LAN, 2x COM, 1x USB
- ECU-1252 – TI Cortex-A9 communication gateway with 2x CAN, 2x LAN, 2x COM Ports
- ECU-1251D – open platform, Cortex-A8, Linux, 2x 10/100 Ethernet, 4x digital in, 4x digital out
- ECU-1050TL – open platform, Cortex A8, Linux OS, 1x 10/100 Ethernet
Operation is over -40 to 70°C, and the computers have a battery-backed real-time clock and a watchdog timer.
“Built-in EdgeLink allows users to set up cloud solutions and manage the entire lifecycle of equipment, monitor factory energy consumption, and analyse renewable energy efficiency through AWS or Azure services,” said Advantech.
Picking the ECU-1051 (photo, second from left) almost at random, it comes with a 300 or 600MHz TI Cortex A8 CPU and 128 or 256Mbyte of DDR3L. Programming is in Linux or C, and firmware can be updated with an SD card or on-line. It supports data logging onto an SD card, and there are dual SIM slots for communication redundancy. MQTT Client for cloud communication is supported.
