My company is just starting the Factory 4.0 journey and utilizing Ignition. One of the challenges we are facing is coming up with a standard client hardware that is low cost and supports JAVA. We are looking at deploying several thousand clients on the shop floor for an in-house developed OEE application to 1000’s of work cells. I am curious what others are using (PC,Tablets, Linux, Android,) ? One thing we find interesting is possibly using a low cost Android tablet to utilize the touch features of our application. I have seen some older post discussing HP & Wyse thin terms and we have used these in the past, but find the cost of these devices are about the same as a PC. Any advice and suggestions are greatly appreciated
I recently bought THIS with 4GB ram and 250 GB SSD for the home made cnc machine.
I installed Win10 and the first thing I tried was running Ignition client over the internet (VPN). I was surprised how well it was running.
I guess if I installed some light Linux distro it would be even better.
We use the RPi3 to display an Ignition Dashboard project on multiple production lines worldwide and they work relatively well. You can argue that the Raspberry Pi 3 would be a good option; it really boils down to your application design:
Limit/eliminate the need of client-side workload
Minimize interaction with the application by the operators
I would suggest, you standardize your servers and clients on ARM servers/clients and Android technology. You must discuss with IA to decide on ARM server based Ignition deployment. You must bring Ubuntu canonical, Samsung and Inductive Automation on board to make this project a great success. Later, your company can gain a lot by showcasing this project as a benchmark for other potential clients. Best Wishes.