Future plans and performance

[SM11]

Привет всем! Извините, но мне нужно писать по-английски.

I discovered Wiren Board a few days ago and I’m very excited because it seems to be exactly what I want and need for my smart home project. I’ve had a good look at your documentation and absolutely adore how open, modular, and reasonably priced your platform is – amazing work! It seems to be considerably better than e.g. Loxone.

So far, I’ve got four questions which I haven’t seen addressed in your documentation:

1. What are your future plans for Wiren Board 7 – is there at least an approximate roadmap that you could share, please? I can see there’s a lot of active development and I’ve found mentions of a Pro and a Lite version. Could you please elaborate on whether you’re after further cost reduction or perhaps improving the robustness?

2. One of my main requirements is high performance and reliability. I would like to have wall switches connected to the control unit via Modbus RTU over RS-485 and monitor their state let’s say every 100 ms – could you please advise on whether the current version of Wiren Board could face issues under such load given a typical number of switches on the bus in a private house? My only frame of reference is the CPU in the Loxone Miniserver v2 which uses an unspecified quad-core CPU and I know the previous version has been running into performance issues, hence I would like a large reserve.

3. I would like to have a custom touchscreen interface attached to the wall – have you considered increasing the performance and adding an HDMI output to the control unit or do you want to keep the power consumption low and/or advise against merging the server and client into a single machine?

4. Why did you make the switch to screw terminals with rev. 6.4 as opposed to something like Wago ‘cage clamp’ or ‘push wire’ connectors?

Thank you.

[EvgenyBoger]

Hello @SM11!
English is working language of this support website, so you are welcome to write in English here.

@SM11

• What are your future plans for Wiren Board 7 – is there at least an approximate roadmap that you could share, please? I can see there’s a lot of active development and I’ve found mentions of a Pro and a Lite version. Could you please elaborate on whether you’re after further cost reduction or perhaps improving the robustness?

At the moment, we don’t have public roadmap. What I can indeed tell you, is that we are continuosly upgrading our devices, including Wiren Board 6 controller. For instance, the current hardware revision is 6.6.0, and there will be another one (6.7.2) available for customers in a 1-2 months. We prefer to keep the backward compatibility for as long as possible, so our customers don’t need to learn how to use a new device unless absolutely necessary.

Our next major release will probably bring a performance boost, as it was the case with Wiren Board 5 to Wiren Board 6 major upgrade. However, since we don’t want to compromise robustness, wide operating temperature range, low power consumption or the price, the release date largely depends on a new microprocessors being available. Right now we are testing a few candidates for a new microprocessors, but it’s a long long way to go. I won’t expect a new major release in the next year or so.

@SM11

• One of my main requirements is high performance and reliability. I would like to have wall switches connected to the control unit via Modbus RTU over RS-485 and monitor their state let’s say every 100 ms – could you please advise on whether the current version of Wiren Board could face issues under such load given a typical number of switches on the bus in a private house? My only frame of reference is the CPU in the Loxone Miniserver v2 which uses an unspecified quad-core CPU and I know the previous version has been running into performance issues, hence I would like a large reserve.

Polling Modbus RTU devices is a not a resource-consuming task, at least when using our software. Speaking of which, the software which is shipped with Wiren Board is written in C++ and optimized for memory- and CPU- constrained embedded systems. So you won’t face performance issues unless you are using third-party resource-hungry software.

@SM11

• I would like to have a custom touchscreen interface attached to the wall – have you considered increasing the performance and adding an HDMI output to the control unit or do you want to keep the power consumption low and/or advise against merging the server and client into a single machine?

It’s something we are considering, but right now we are unable to implement without compromising something from the list above.

The current solution is to use a dedicated Andorid or iOS tablet for visualization.

@SM11

1. Why did you make the switch to screw terminals with rev. 6.4 as opposed to something like Wago ‘cage clamp’ or ‘push wire’ connectors?

Unfortunately spring terminals are not robust enough in a real-world use. You can easily damage the terminals with a too thick wire. Moreover, we do recommend to use stranded wires for cabling wihch normally require to use ferrules, which increase the thickness of the wire. Overall, we learned that these requirements are most important for terminals, according to our customes:

• Pluggable terminal blocks are the must
• The thicker wire it can withstand is the better
• It should be robust so you can’t permanently damage it

Then, terminal blocks should be 3.5mm or 3.81mm in pitch, so we can fit enough terminals. We haven’t find spring terminals which meet these requirements yet. WAGO picoMAX look promising, but they are still way too expensive for our target price range.

[SM11]

Thank you very much for the prompt and comprehensive reply, @EvgenyBoger! It’s apparent that you’ve put a lot of careful thought into the design and I’m looking forward to using your platform, hopefully in a few months once I get everything ready.