I’ve been in this business for a little shy of 40 years, and I’ve encountered a lot of different hardware and applications during my trips around the sun. It’s been a great experience, and it took me to places literally around the world. When I got to thinking about an industrial PC (IPC), I admit that it took me a while to remember the last time I used one. It was then that I realized that my career has narrowed somewhat, in that the early part was equally process and packaging industry, while the latter two-thirds have been pretty much exclusively in packaging machinery, specifically for consumable products.
Like many people these days, I jump onto a web browser and call up my favorite search engine when I am looking for inspiration. I wasn’t even 30 seconds into that search when I realized that I have been working with IPCs that whole time, but I wasn’t aware of that distinction. Industrial PCs come in all kinds of shapes and sizes, depending on the application and the environment that you intend the application to live in.
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The primary place we might run into an IPC these days is the panel PC. This is an all-in-one solution combining an industrial computer and a touchscreen, more commonly known as a human-machine interface (HMI). The HMI of the past would have been a dedicated unit with an interactive screen and a black box with a specific communication port to talk to a central programmable logic controller (PLC) in a specific communication protocol. The panel PC of today is literally a computer with a touchscreen attached to it. Since it is a computer, it comes with Ethernet ports, sometimes serial ports, and USB ports to attach peripherals like a mouse and a keyboard. Also, since it is a computer, it may have software other than the graphical interface application.
Many HMIs even have embedded development software that is accessed via a web browser, eliminating the need to download sometimes expensive software to program the application. These are water- and dust-resistant but would not be good in an especially harsh environment.
