1.0 Myio Goals and Concepts
How it all started
A while ago I wanted to turn on and off a couple of devices from one of my Linux PC's. There are literally thousands of solutions on the web, some simple, some not so. Serial port, parallel port, USB, RS232, modbus, Profibus, i2c. You name it, it's out there. Nothing really looked that promising for what I wanted though, so I wound up making a cusom serial unit with some simple handshaking and a watchdog timer.
Skip forward a bit and again I wanted to turn some stuff on and off, but based on some analog input parameters. Once again I leapt onto the web, and googled some hours away. Lots of solutions out there, but nothing that really spun my wheels again. Off the shelf solutions for simple automation seemed to be either too complex and expensive or lacking in the basic electrical or protocol robustness that I wanted.
So, off into the shed I went with PIC programmer and soldering iron in hand to re-invent the wheel!
Intially I started out to create my own system and protocol, and then went down the path of creating a modbus compatible RTU, and now I've flipped back to creating my own system from the ground up but using the lessons I learnt from working with the modbus.
Goals
- To Create a simple, robust, and 100% open source process control system from HMI, through SCADA to PLC right down to the RTU's.
- Create hardware that is realistically cheap for enthusiasts to build at home, while still being robust enough electrically for light industrial use.
- Have fun! (I enjoy this, gotta have a hobby....)