Mr. Crismancich, what significance do open source hardware and software currently have in automation technology, and what significance will they have in the foreseeable future?
Boris Crismancich, Business Development Manager at Kunbus: All major market players have now realized that open source is an important topic and is becoming increasingly important. Users have realized that it makes no sense to get involved in a vendor lock-in, because then they can only use devices and solutions from one and the same manufacturer. Initially, many manufacturers tried to be only half open: They claimed to be completely open, but restricted premium features to their own devices, so that third-party devices were second-class devices.

The problems that a vendor lock-in can cause are not new. But why are they becoming so acute at the moment?
The reason is the development of industrial communication towards IIoT. Because the application scenarios of IIoT are very diverse, all integrated devices need to be interoperable. Whether controllers, bus systems or sensors - everything has to work with everything else. And in view of this, relying on a closed system from a single provider will not work in the IIoT age any more than building a smartphone that is only equipped with apps from the device manufacturer.

Wouldn't it be nice for users if they could simply go to a company and say, please create an automation system for my application?
Yes, it would be wonderfully easy if the components really worked well together. However, it is crucial to look at the whole thing from the perspective of the application. In the days when devices only worked for a single use case, the method of choice was of course to purchase all components from one and the same manufacturer. Nowadays, however, we no longer have typewriters in consumer electronics, for example, but smartphones and tablets. And developments in industry will follow a very similar path because, given the increasing complexity and variety of components, it makes more and more sense to rely on specialist companies that are better at certain things, such as ex-sensor technology or a machine learning app.
There is also the risk that the manufacturer, for whatever reason, is suddenly no longer able to deliver - and then users have a massive problem. Monocultures are always vulnerable. But if I operate a diverse system, I have fewer single points of failure and a more resilient hardware architecture and overall infrastructure.

But for all the components to be interoperable, you need generally recognized communication standards.
Yes, and that is precisely the reason why the VDMA, for example, has decided to rely on OPC UA.

Nicolai Buchwitz, Kunbus: "The new generation of Revolution Pi will open up completely new fields of application."

© Kunbus

Mr. Buchwitz, what role does the advance of IT companies into the OT sector play in the trend towards open source?
Nicolai Buchwitz, Product Manager for the Revolution Pi family: With the merging of IT and OT into IoT or IIoT, more and more traditional IT companies with a background in software development are looking at the OT market and offering solutions there. However, these are companies that do not come from a world in which there are providers of complete automation systems along with the corresponding software, but from a world in which products are developed with Linux computers based on existing software libraries or programming languages such as Python. Nowadays, they also expect a modern automation specialist to provide a platform with precisely these technologies.

Last but not least: What new product is Kunbus presenting this fall?
We are presenting a new generation of the Revolution Pi, our industrial-grade open source PC based on the Raspberry Pi. Instead of the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3, the RevPi 4 is based on the Compute Module 4 and therefore offers more CPU cores, more power and more RAM. Gigabit Ethernet is introduced with two connections. Our Pi-Bridge for internal communication to and between connected modules has been renewed so that modules can be connected with shorter cycle times, which should be particularly interesting for industrial Ethernet bus systems. Automation technology can be connected wirelessly using a native Bluetooth and WLAN function. The increased CPU performance of the new generation will also open up completely new fields of application - from classic edge connectivity and data connection to simple machine learning and predictive maintenance scenarios.