“About five years ago when we launched the original BeagleBoard, what you could do with ARM devices was not as clear,” says Jason Kridner, Cofounder, BeagleBoard.org. “Especially as the superscalar ARM core was just coming out, people did not know much about what it was really capable of doing. The closest networking appliance out there were things like the Nokia N800-types of devices, but we were really taking a big jump in performance.

“For the industrial  part, the approach was to put this cool technology into people’s hands and get out of the way,” Kridner continues. “It was really just to try to reach that price point so that folks that wanted to go and play with embedded computer software on these networking appliance could go and do that. And it was really an industry changer; you can see all the things that have come since then.”

refer to:
http://embedded-computing.com/articles/diy-pushes-open-hardware-kindergarten-kickstarter/

Leveraging IT Technology for industrial controls

With that said, the controls world is going to be moving with anautomation that has a definite consumer bias, with product development and release cycles of six months or less. In an industry where the average life expectancy of an automotive production line is eight years, it is impossible to expect the networking in an industrial setting to keep up with modern IT standards. Therefore, we turn our attention to the technologies that have existed the industrial, with the most open standards and the very best support. These are the protocols we wish to use and keep, and this article highlights and explains some of these technologies. This article does not focus on the technical implementations of each piece of technology. Rather, it is assumed the reader will be using packaged solutions such as a function block for a PLC.

refer to:
http://www.automation.com/leveraging-it-technology-for-industrial-controls-applications

Consolidation for both GbE ports configuration

 The board also supports two additional 10 GbE ports combined with PCI Express 3.0 x4 on the backplane, all based on PICMG 2.20 for applications with high bandwidth requirements. The features are rounded out with USB solutions and Serial ATA for an onboard 2.5" SATA hard disk or industrial grade fanless embedded systems – all in a single-slot computer.Several Alliance members offer off-the-shelf solutions that help designers take advantage of the improved performance. For example, Premier member Kontron offers seven platforms based on the embedded systems, such as the Kontron CP6005-SA shown in Figure 2. This 6U CompactPCI board offers high computing and graphics performance along with a complement of high-bandwidth embedded systems that includes five Gigabit Ethernet channels for external and internal PICMG 2.16 compliant Ethernet traffic

refer to:

http://embedded-computing.com/articles/transform-factory-the-intel-core-processor/