Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1213413
14 PCB007 MAGAZINE I FEBRUARY 2020 The ShoeBox industrial monitoring has the monitor that connects to machines, sensors, power lines, and other control signals and sends Third-party Connection Boxes and Software A third option to connect legacy machines and islands of automation can be the Shoe- Box that Seica is making, which is a small Raspberry Pi computer in a box together with a digital I/O inter- face that connects to any available data source, including ports, sen- sors, switches, etc. The box has soft- ware, which works as a CFX client, such that any machine can be a part of the CFX network or ModBus TCP that connects to other PLCs [2] . The ShoeBox monitor communicates with two radio channels and one power line channel (Figure 4). The Raspberry Pi 4 has the unique speci- fications for a computer the size of a credit card, yet under $40. Figure 3: Modern PLCs can provide much of the smart factory's lower-level networking. Figure 4: A ShoeBox network connector made by Seica is based on the pop- ular Raspberry-Pi computer (A) connected to its 40-pin GPIO, (B) enabling it to connect to most older non-Industry 4.0 equipment [2] . (Source: Seica)