Can anybody tell me if there are any plans for a Groov communication brain? Something akin to the SNAP-PAC-EB line? I have some applications that will require multiple Groov chassis and I’d love to not have to pay $1500+ for a full controller for each chassis. I know I can use the RIO in some cases, but a traditional Groov chassis would fit my needs much better. I only need one controller capable of running Ignition, Node-RED, etc. I know I can use SNAP-PAC hardware, but I’d love to get everything on the same platform.
I know the engineers have kicked it around a tiny bit, but nothing has come from it.
We don’t charge for Ignition, or Node-RED or groov View or the PAC Control Engine in the PR1, so most of the costs are in the hardware.
How to ‘dumb’ down the hardware such that it can still run 16 modules of all signal types, but not be a controller to save a lot of bucks is hard to do.
Sure, we drop the display and the HDMI port, you probably still want the USB ports and the dual Ethernet, so its a total savings of few bucks in those two things?
We could try and go from a quad core to a dual core. That would need to be tested very carefully to ensure that the hundreds of points people could load up the 16 module rack with would still be scanned at the rates we all expect.
I see your point, but its hard to see what hardware we could remove that would drop the cost a ton without impacting system performance.
I’ve always wanted something like a module with a cable that connects to the controller slot of another rack allowing for daisy-chaining racks or just expansion past the 16 slot rack without another controller.
@nickvnlr: you’re in luck – I’ve got dozens of old G4 bricks and hundreds of modules that allow you to daisy chain bricks together and connect to the controller via serial. No pesky ethernet required. I have installations in my building now with a single LCM4 controller with dozens of bricks.
I could be wrong, but pretty sure there was a cheeky tongue in cheek from @varland just now… but I see where you are headed… Something like simple I/O expansion. Lots of basic I/O more than high speed counting or advanced analog features?
@Beno: that’s right – definitely not a serious reply on my end. It’s just a bit funny how sometimes old the old ideas seem to become new again.
The simple I/O expansion you mention is similar to what I was originally thinking. Something similar to the old dumb bricks (remote simple) we had back in the G4 days. Nothing high speed. No PID. Just let me do simple reads and writes. If I need more than that, I throw a PR1 brain on there.
