Industrial Arduino board compared to Industrial Shields PLC

Arduino Mega2560 meet M-Duino 21+
June 10, 2020 by
Industrial Arduino board compared to Industrial Shields PLC
Andrei Postolache

Introduction

In this post, we are going to make a comparison between an Arduino Mega board and a PLC Arduino M-Duino 21+, to see the main differences and characteristics of each one. Although our PLCs for industrial automation is based on Arduino, there are many improvements that we have applied to turn the board into a proper industrial PLC resistant to industrial environments.


                                                  

Power supply

The first difference is that the power of the equipment is different as the Arduino Mega board works at 5V and instead the PLC controller is adapted for industrial applications with which it can be powered from 12V to 24V.

GPIO's

As for the I/Os, the digital pins of the Arduino board work at 5V and the analog pins have a voltage range that goes from 0V to 5V. Instead, the M-Duino 21+ is adapted to work with digital inputs and outputs ranging from 5V to 24V.  On the other hand, we have the analog I / O's that go from 0V to 10V, but there is the possibility of working with  4-20mA analog inputs connecting the hardware that you can find in this link. To make sure that our programmable logic controllers are able to work in industrial environments, the Digital I/Os are optoisolated, so the voltage is isolated from the internal circuits. 


Digital I/Os - Industrial Arduino board compared to Industrial Shields PLC

As for pins 2 and 3, they work at 5V and can be both analog and digital as in the Arduino board and finally the PLC models with relays work with 220Vac.

Pins 2 and 3 - Industrial Arduino board compared to Industrial Shields PLC

To make sure that our industrial controllers are able to work in industrial environments, the Digital I/Os are optoisolated, so the voltage is isolated from the internal circuits. 


Communications

The Arduino automation board only uses 3 protocols which are I2C, SPI and Serial TTL. In contrast, in this aspect, the M-Duino PLC is more versatile including also RS-232, RS-485, RS-422 and Ethernet. Apart from these ones you can find the GPRS family which can also work with WiFi/Bluetooth, LoRa and Dali (lighting protocol). So this controller Arduino can be very useful to communicate with all kinds of devices and create an IoT network. 

The M-Duino PLC - Industrial Arduino board compared to Industrial Shields PLC

Finally, our PLCs have some extra accessories:

The first one is an internal RTC (Real Time Clock) which includes a cell coin to keep the time. The second one is an SD slot to have internal data storage.

Our products also ensure a good performance in industrial environments, for this reason, they are certified by ETL, CE documents including RoHS.





If you are thinking of automating your company, discover our wide range of products specially designed for the industrial environment. You will find the PLC, touch panel or OpenMote that best suits your needs.

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Industrial Arduino board compared to Industrial Shields PLC
Andrei Postolache June 10, 2020

Looking for your ideal Programmable Logic Controller?

Take a look at this product comparison with other industrial controllers Arduino-based. 

We are comparing inputs, outputs, communications and other features with the ones of the relevant brands.


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