Updated January 29, 2021 – Additional clarity and new products like the Raspberry Pi Pico. Improved readability.

You want to get something ready-made because you are prototyping, not mass-producing. The solution you are looking for goes by many names; electronic control unit, rapid control prototype, microcontroller, vehicle computer, etc.

Depending on if you are a researcher, startup, or industry, the balance of your needs between cost/speed/flexibility are different. So how do you choose? It depends on your needs in these key areas:

* Generally the case but exceptions exist

So which tool will work best for your application? Jump to each section to learn more below.

For When You Need All the Above

Controllers

You need an electronic control unit when you have these kinds of problems, and you need reliability:

High reliability can be thought of as:

Confidence that your system will run as desired the same way all the time. The device can self detect if something is wrong, quickly fix itself and resume. For automotive systems, this can mean update cycles every few milliseconds and the system automatically resetting within that cycle if anything goes wrong.

The qualification of safety for an automotive system can be defined using ISO 26262 and its ASIL rating.

Example Controllers for Purchase

The controllers listed here range from R&D suited to OEM integration.

Want to learn about how the FlexCase compares to some of the controllers listed here?

Computers

A computer is a great choice when you need a high degree of flexibility and are trying to solve these types of problems:

There are many computers designed for more industrial applications, typically labeled in-vehicle computer, industrial computer, fanless computer, or mini PC. Costs can range anywhere from a few hundred dollars for a mini PC to a few thousand for a fully loaded in-vehicle computer.

Usually, you can put together a quick prototype by adding functionality with USB addons, such as a modem, GPIO, or even CAN. For automating a human at the computer, a script can be written using a bash script (Linux) or Autohotkey (Windows).

IoT

When the primary problem you are solving is transmitting data wirelessly, IoT products are what you are looking for.

For industry ready solutions, fleet tracking and management products like Geotab or HEM Data can be used to get started rapidly. They will supply you with the hardware and connection services for a fee. Some level of customization is available.

For a more custom solution, the hardware offered by CSS Electronics could be a good choice. Their specialty is in logging CAN data, but many of their resources are great for learning about building your own IoT products.

Maker

The hobbyist/marker space has offerings in all three categories under a new philosophy. These products are often an excellent choice for low cost, very simple, proof of concept tests.

These low-cost products often have strong ties with the open source community, which makes learning and getting help online very accessible (and free). However, there are some trade-offs between the maker products and the more industrial options.

Listed below are a few popular brands broken down by function. There are many variants of each product with small tweaks that might be important to some users. Many compiled selection guides on the maker space already exist that I won’t repeat here, but if for example the Arduino is close to what you are looking for, a search of “Arduino alternatives” will give you a large list of products to investigate.

*Not well suited for high reliability applications like previously mentioned controllers.

Each product can typically be augmented with shields, which are add-on boards designed to work with existing products. A good example of a shield is one that adds relays, which allows the programmer to control higher voltage and current loads.

Maker products tend to start falling short as a project becomes more complicated than the proof of concept phase. The user ends up needing to do more and more design work to get something up and running.

The All-In-One For All

The FlexCase can be a good fit when you are solving any of the above problems. The FlexCase shines when you:

When Audesse began working on its first turnkey offering, we found a key product missing.

An easy to use, flexible piece of high reliability hardware (for rapid iteration) that was as powerful as a computer, Internet of things (IoT) enabled, and cost-effective for deployment

We invented the FlexCase because we needed a blend of all features in a cost-effective package. The FlexCase has helped everyone across a wide range of industries and problems.

Conclusions

I hope this was a helpful crash course in finding the control system you need for your next idea. Are you looking for help quickly implementing a control system in a cost-effective manner? You can tap into our over 40 years of controls experience by working with Audesse on a range of automation/controls/IoT projects. Our team can get you up and running in as fast as a week.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this post are those of the author and do not constitute professional advice on behalf of Audesse. Any content is intended to be introductory in nature.