BeaglePLC

This is a project to create a "dock" for a BB that will turn it into a powerful PLC for Industrial Automation. It's mostly an Open Hardware project that adds a SPI backplane and plug in IO cards to the BB to allow it to control equipment in place of a proprietary PLC. There are many Linux automation projects that would benefit from having an industrial strength platform to run on.

The project consists of a backplane with an SPI bus that has 8 slots for IO cards that use the industrial standard 24VDC levels. The outputs can directly drive valves, contactors, and other actuators to control equipment. There are sinking and sourcing output cards and an isolated input card that can be strapped as either sinking or sourcing. I will assemble the necessary drivers and release a demo PLC program in C with ncurses under the GPL. The Hardware PCB, Gerber, BOM, Schematic, etc., files will be released under an Open license, probably Creative Commons. Anyone will be able to reproduce the project under that license. Registrar: cwuollet.myopenid.com