Harting MICA computing system First Look HD

I had an Industrial control module arrive a few weeks ago from a company called Harting in Germany, courtesy of RS-Components and became quickly intrigued by it. I believe this is a World First for me, being able to review this Industrial GPIO Module before any other blogger To Quote Hartings own website:- HARTING IIC MICA (Modular Industry Computing Architecture) makes it possible to temporarily save, evaluate and process data in the immediate vicinity of machinery and equipment. With its modular open platform, the HARTING IIC MICA can be customised with custom hardware, software and interfaces – to suit your individual requirements for Integrated Industry. The module is tiny at only 132 mm x 86 mm x 35 mm but packs a lot of power and built like a tank. It sports a 1GHz Arm Cortex TI Sitara based processor, 1GB Ram, 4GB Flash and upto 32GB SD Storage topped of with a POE enabled Ethernet port used for administration and user developed interfaces and finally an optional RFID interface. It also hosts 8 x 12 - 24V GPIO ports up to 100mA each. All connections of course are via Industrial Grade Plugs and sockets also made by Harting. The module can be used to integrate legacy systems into the Internet of Things and also provide a simple way of getting basic industrial sensing to the cloud or private networks with minimal fuss. If a customer wants, the GPIO can be expanded via a customizable area in the unit. A prototyping board is actually provided with the basic unit but customers can use other fabrication techniques of required and in order to maintain certifications. The obvious benefit of this module is that it is Certified for Industrial, Rail and Automotive applications and is also IP67 Rated and with Industrial temperature range supported without any additional heatsinks or fans. There are absolutely no moving parts in this. The module as provided runs a linux core and LXC (Linux Containers) on top of that, think lightweight Virtualization. It is configured to support up to 8 containers. Many containers are available simply by downloading from the Harting support site here:-http://www.harting-mica.com/en/downloads/ and includes a "GPIO Demo" container ready interact with a customer provided MQTT Server and the 8 GPIO lines. My Favorite was the Debian Jessie container and I will be providing a demo including code etc of a Node Red install interacting with the GPIO and MQTT, along with hosting a simple WEB UI (Note this is simple only due to my efforts, you can run a full web server if you need to.) Other Containers available include Java, Various Pythons and BusyBox. Example programming snippets are also provided via the various support documents also available from Harting. Overall I am pretty impressed with the hardware, this is such a new product that it is not even on RS-Components website yet (as of March 016) so expect a few updates and more sample containers to appear over the next while. I will also make my demo containe