SPS 2022: Raspberry Pi 4 at the heart of Kontron industrial controller

At 1.5GHz they will be the fastest of the company’s Pi-based PLCs.

“The main field of application of the electronic control based on the Raspberry Pi is in device and machinery construction,” according to the company. “PiXtend Pi 4 comes with the Broadcom BCM2711 – the most powerful processor of the Raspberry Pi Foundation. The quad-core Arm Cortex A72 64bit SoC supports up to 8Gbyte of RAM.”

The controllers are a combination of a Raspberry Pi 4 and an interface PCB, some inside DIN rail-mount metal cases (see photo) with passive heatsinking for 1.5GHz operation.

The underlying expansion boards, which can be bought separately, come in two forms:

• PiXtend V2 L – the longer version, which has RS232, Modbus RTU capable RS485, CAN, Ethernet and Wi-Fi once a Pi is installed
• PiXtend V2 S – the shorter version, which has RS232, Ethernet and Wi-Fi once a Pi is installed

For example, the ‘L’ board adds a battery-backed real-time clock, temperature sensors, humidity sensors, 16x digital inputs, 12x digital outputs, 4x analogue voltage inputs, 2x analogue current inputs, 2x analogue voltage outputs, 4x relays, 6x PWM (or servo) outputs, and there are 4x 5V GPIOs.

With a Pi 4 installed, with either a Basis image or a Codesys image on the SD card, these bare board combinations become:

• PiXtend V2 -L- ePLC Basic Pi 4  27 x 102 x 272mm
• PiXtend V2 -S- ePLC Basic Pi 4  27 x 102 x 166mm

For the versions pictured, in DIN-rail-mount aluminium housings, replace ‘Basic’ with ‘Pro’ in the names above

According to Kontron, the Pi 4’s own Gigabit Ethernet will “impresses with its high-performance”, and its two micro-HDMI ports with support up to 4Kp30 video with audio. There are also two USB 2.0 ports and two USB 3.0 ports.

Connectors on the expansion boards are industry-grade, said Kontron, and expand the IO system for digital and analogue sensors and actuators, including connection via Modbus.

Operation is from 24V and over 0 – 50°C

Programmed in languages including C or Python,

Product web pages: (potential confused warning: these also show Raspberry Pi 3B+ versions)

PiXtend V2 S

PiXtend V2 L