Over the past several decades, automation systems have seen significant advances when it comes to software, such as embedded single board computers, but not much has changed with automation hardware. While small changes have been made to hardware in terms of higher cycle times and increased capacities, the overall look and feel has been mostly unchanged. This is in part due to industrial users utilizing long hardware life cycles, but companies are now looking to make major changes to improve efficiency.

• Insight into Hardware Automation Changes: At a recent European forum, representatives from HP laid out their view of the future as it relates to hardware automation technology. HP contends that the future will revolve around meshed networks, distributed intelligence, and large capacity flat memory. This distributed intelligence offers increased security due to devices using sophisticated data sharing rights to share data with other devices without storing or even seeing data that another device doesn’t have access to. This is much different than some current data sharing technologies where large numbers of devices have access to huge amounts of data.

• Technology is Being Driven by Autonomous Cars: This new technology is being literally “driven” by huge strides in autonomous car technology. With self-driving cars, multiple devices must communicate and share data to avoid catastrophe. Whether it is other autonomous cars or human-driven cars, it is incredibly important that data is accessible at all times between devices to avoid collisions and other issues on the road. This same technology is being used in industrial applications where industrial systems must communicate with each other across multiple devices.

• Future Bright with Smaller Motherboard Designs: The future of hardware automation is bright thanks to continued advances in motherboard designs that are smaller and much more powerful than entire computers from the past. As manufacturers are able to utilize system on a chip (SoC) architectures, these devices will require much less power, cost, and have much smaller footprints.

Orion Technologies is at the Forefront of Single Board Computer Innovation

At Orion Technologies, we are constantly improving our embedded single board computers for industrial uses. As the technology continues to improve, Orion will be at the forefront, developing top-notch solutions to improve hardware automation across a myriad of industries.