Comment by borjah
5 days ago
Yeah. As some has said already PLC are more oriented to robotic arms in factories etc, where space is not a premium. Robots like anymal from anybotics, spot from boston dynamics or the unidog from unitree to name a few don't use PLC at all due to lack of space. Also energy efficiency, mcu at most will push less than a watt to move something complex, a motor control for the FOC, I mentioned earlier.
I worked for the past 4 years in HP siteprint.The main problem was developing all to fit inside a pelican case that you could check in on a plane. The smallest PLC was almost the full internal volume of the robot. That's why I said microcontrollers, more ready available to experiment at home, faaaaaaaar more cheaper and those two, very well documented. STM32 in europe is the big player but is harder to get into, the documentation tends to be cahotic.
If you've managed to collect some good documentation, links appreciated! Or PDFs (my Gmail username is the same as my HN username) if inclined.
Thank you!
About stm32 or the rp2040?
The ESP32. Thank you!
Though by total coincidence, it looks like I'm about to inherit responsibility for a fleet of Raspberry Pies that manage dashboards on a factory production floor. But they are older, and it's probably just going to be like managing any other low spec Debian server, albeit connected to a monitor.