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> I can see that things like these would be a good step up for those who were originally not even using PLCs

I agree that that's what Arduino thinks the market is, but I disagree that their conceptual market will buy this.

Arduino-branded hardware is typically 5x the cost of the clones (remember, it's OSH) at no noticeable improvement in quality. DIN-rail mountable arduino clones and modules with I/O isolation that run on 24V power already exist at very reasonable price points, and from reputable dealers such as Automation Direct. I've used ruggedized modules such as Industruino (although their prices have definitely gone upmarket) and they're nice. IME, the only people who buy actual Arduino hardware are either beginners who don't realize that the much less expensive clones are every bit as good, or business buyers who don't really care, because it's not their money.

But maybe I'm wrong and there's enough of a price-insensitive market to make this a success. I certainly hope so. I'm a freelancer, so the bigger the market, the better for me :-)

I have designed & built an arduino clone-based product that mounts on DIN rail because the hardware it communicates with also does. Multiple installations running large machine control applications without a hitch. The clones are fine.

I definitely see where you're coming from and I think these are valid points. In my personal experience though, there definitely does exist a market of "price insensitive, as long as it's under x". I think Arduino probably fits in there.

I feel like at least based on the quality of some boards vs clones that I have, there are definitely cases where I would have been "fired for not buying Arduino [IBM]" due to stuff like weird USB serial chips requiring driver hackery etc.

And I've definitely been in the situation where you tell someone it requires some part that costs "several hundreds of dollars" and they're like "oh no problem that's not an issue at all", because they were looking at the magnitude and not penny pinching.

I suppose that would be the market for this kind of thing. There's the other thing that you mention, where if you're using Arduino for this purpose, you might not be experienced enough to trust yourself to choose the right clone. Arduino provides sane defaults and generally the installations I've seen in the wild tended to use fairly close to "defaults".

You may have run into a counterfeit FTDI chip, then. The normal $5 arduino clones from reputable manufacturers often have genuine chips. The $2-3 ones are trouble.

Most of the clones have stopped even using the FTDI knockoffs nowadays. There are alternative USB-to-serial chips from other manufacturers, like the CH340 series, that work very well.

Yeah Automation Direct is already in this space with their Arduino PLC[1] which has compatibility with their existing modules/etc.

I'm only adjacent to the space and have use their stuff for some home automation but from what I've seen it's more important that you can get replacement parts and reliability.

[1] https://www.automationdirect.com/open-source/home

$43 - $66

https://www.automationdirect.com/adc/shopping/catalog/progra...

That market is already covered by the cheap dev boards, arduino clones and Chinese PLCs at considerably less cost than the officially branded parts.

You can't even buy an Arduino Uno for the price these guys are selling PLCs for: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005004887420307.html

> For a small scale industrial process, even a really hacked together setup can work surprisingly well, and while you have a chance of running into some show stopping problem, there's an equal chance of the hacked together setup continuing to function for the required time. If labour to fix stuff and/or small enough scale to temporarily have a little downtime are effectively free, this can work out positively.

Can confirm that this is happening to some extent in biotech startups. Most of them don’t have the resources to hire grad students en masse to do the tedious labwork so they’re investing into lab automation. At the seed/series A level there usually isn’t enough money to splurge on brand name lab equipment beyond a few core pieces of equipment and with experiments running, there’s enough tech savvy downtime to experiment with hacky but cheap solutions. I’ve even seen HomeAssistant driven lab automation setups driven by AppDaemon apps with ESP32s used to control a mix of pumps and sensors (with CI/CD, though the whole thing was backed by a proper LIMS). It felt incredibly hacky but uptime was stellar once the SD card was replaced with an SSD.

It used to be that I had to go to Staubli or similar manufacturer and spec out a $50k robotic arm just to move plates from a liquid handler to the fridge. Now the same can be had for a few grand or less and there’s even open source options.

I see this PLC along those lines, where a lab might need to control a bunch of pumps and syringes with some synchronized via RS485 for realtime control and others on WiFi for less time sensitive stuff. A low cost PLC in that sweet spot between enterprise PLC and bare dev board could do really well.

These PLCs would be the perfect complement to ESP32s and RaspberryPi if they’re cheap enough to stockpile like RPis were preshortage. It’s unfortunate they haven’t published pricing yet, which tells me that it’ll be too expensive for hobbyists.

I've watched someone in my social circle building a company around pre- and post-workout snacks and your line

> even a really hacked together setup can work surprisingly well

Is exactly right. Now that they got those three machines working, efforts go mostly into marketing, not into engineering.