PIC & Reliability

[zacky]

Hi all
Is the PIC microcontroller reliable for tough industrial field and can be rely on to perform sensitive control tasks.
I not what other microcontroller you recommend ?

Thanks

 

[felixc]

The microcontroller itself is rarely the source of unreliability. The rest of the circuitry around it, the protections against discharges, noise, heat, and of course a good power supply source and a good interfacing circuit to teh rest of you aplication. This is what makes the difference between a good and a bad industrial system. Any MCU will work reliably is the design as a whole is well done.

 

[itsmoked]

felix is absolutely correct but left out the software.. The software needs to also be robustly done. A redundant, conservative, "industrial" programming philosophy is a large part of a reliable microcontroller project.

zacky; To answer your question. Yes! A PIC is certainly tough enough to perform sensitive control tasks in an industrial field.

 

[OperaHouse]

One day I was in a "lets blow it up" mood with a PIC design. We had this glorified cattle prod and just drew arcs to the board. It just kept humming along without even a reset. Eventually we blew out the terminal that was connected to the PIC through an opto isolator. The PIC never stopped! This was an interesting communication design. One of the "normally on" panel LEDs was actually outputting serial data all the time though us mere mortals could never see it flash.

The one observation I have made is that the PICs (and likely other makes) used in the internal self clock mode are highly immune to noise. Adding a crystal seems to open up a big portal to to the outside noise world.

 

[itsmoked]

OperaHouse; Wow, sounds like "Office Space" heheheh

Zackies question is sooo broad.. Your crystal point is good. But what really gets the crystal is mechanical shock.

Drop a system running on an xtal and you could get lots of um.. un-happyness.

 

[IRstuff]

The bottom line is that PICs are DESIGNED for industrial applications. Unless you have specific requirements and conditions that you can stipulate, the answers you get are going to be overly broad, irrelevant or flippant.

TTFN

 

[zeitghost]

Even got a built in watchdog timer...

For those resets when you least expect it, especially during development when you forget to set the configuration bits properly. (Like I inevitably do...).

 

[itsmoked]

Yes zeitghost.. And go on and on and on until you notice that same blinky pattern on those LEDs..

 

[felixc]

Oops I was assuming that the programmers were doing a good job. What an idiot I am! ;-0

 

[IRstuff]

Actually, it's not so bad ;-) The Reliability Analysis Center had a cute equation for predicting reliability growth in software and if the throughput is sufficiently high, say for a 400 MHz Power PC, the predicted failure rate was 1 in 10^14 yrs, or something close to that

TTFN

 

[plcsavvy]

The pic brand of microcontroller is just fine for industrial use. I would also recommend an SX28 or 52 ac/dp from ubicom (formerly scenix semiconductor) Parallax offers a BASIC interpreter which can allow for both assembly and Basic instructions. The chip is extremely fast as it can execute 50 million instructions per second and run at up to 50Mhz.

best regards, PLCSAVVY