Plant & Facilities Engineering

Do you think PC hardware and software has progressed to the point ...

No it has passed that point...
It was fine, but some jerk keeps changing the operating system .

To be fair (moi?) A PC isn't evolving for that usage...it doesn't know what it wants to be...it is aimed at the gullible public who want a veneer of simplicity papering over the cracks of a convoluted system which has grown up as a mess...

Del.

I think that capability was already available 15 years ago.

I remember seeing Intel based motherboards inside CNC milling machines. The boards were older generation P2's and at the heart of the 3 axis controllers, the displays and the machine specific software used to create tool-paths. All they had done was take a complete computer and integrated it into the milling machine.

We discovered this by accident when diagnosing a malfunction which was corrected by replacing the motherboard, not with an authorized part from the CNC vendor, but with a board purchased from a computer vendor. The board was a Pentium 2 CPU which gives you some idea how old this application is.

The desk top computers we were using at that time for designing were running P4 technology because we needed the CPU processor's higher speed. The parts were designed in a 3D solid modeling software, their surfaces used to generate tool paths and the program run through the post processor appropriate to the production machine. Then the programs were fed by network out to the production floor to the production manager's PC and hence to the machine.

Given how long this technology has been around I can't help to believe that the answer to your question is a resounding yes, unless I don't understand the question?

We've been doing this for 14 years already. At first, we encountered resistance because no one believed that an office PC desktop could last in a factory environment. Well, it did and we've been using them ever since.

Of course, we had them inside nice, cool air-conditioned controlrooms but if you want to avoid them breaking down in the middle of a production run, that's what you'd do.

One capability that we haven't tried is using the PC directly as controllers. Allen-Bradley has their Soft-Logix where the PC becomes a PLC and can directly interface with remote input/output and control the process directly. For some reason, we don't trust MS OS to be reliable enough (anything new about that?).

A PC is just hardware and can be modified to fit the application.

For a secure operating system i would go for linux, Windows is to cost heavy and too unstable IMO for critical systems. The main problem with linux is that it lags behind the products with driver compatibility. But as a programmer who wries an application for his system (i hope in C(++)) then writing drivers for C would not be difficult i guess.