On 29/08/2020 12:39, Chris Green wrote:
John Rumm wrote:
On 28/08/2020 22:00, Adrian Brentnall wrote:

Actually - I have a RPi hooked up to my kiln - it monitors the
temperature in the kiln through its own thermocouple and draws a
real-time graph that can be viewed over the LAN.

I must confess I'm not confident in the RPi's ability to run things like
kiln controllers, which need to run, unsupervised, for 8 - 10 hours at a
time, often overnight.

I have had Pis running for years uninterrupted without any problem...
(normally only get a reset if there is a power cut!)

For me - the RPi is just too 'full-featured' - it's go too much going on
within the o/s for me to trust it to keep its mind on the
kiln-controlling job.Â* But then my background is real-time,
safety-critical systems....

It does not typically run a true real time os, however for kiln control
there are no hard real time requirements.

If you want a "simpler" option, look at an arduino - much less baggage
to worry about.

Much harder to 'talk to' than a Pi though. The big advantage of the
Pi (and/or BeagleBoneBlack) is that they are 'proper' computers and
will join a home network just like any other and you can write
programs and such on them rather than downloading like you do with the
Arduino.


And it's that very complexity (to my mind) that makes them less ideal
for safety-critical applications...

Don't get me wrong - they're great devices - and I've used them in
monitoring situations.