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Original Raspberry Pi Developer Raspberry Pi Developer
Article by:
Aleksandar Dakić
Original article address:
https://magazinmehatronika.com/edatec-ed-hmi3020-070c-hmi-recenzija/
Aleksandar Dakić Editor-in-Chief of Mechatronics magazine, Aleksandar is also the founder of Mechatronics magazine. With a background in electrical engineering and many years in specialized journals, he focuses on Mechatronics magazine's key content and promotes several initiatives.
ED-HMI3020-070C
Overall Score: 9.2 points
Performance: 9 points
Software Support: 10 points
Peripherals and IO: 10 points
Quality of Workmanship: 8
Price: 9

The Benefits
  • Many networking options (Gigabit Ethernet PoE, 2.4/5 GHz Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 5.0)
  • Software support and stability unrivaled in the SBC world
  • Well-designed expansion boards offer a wealth of features: SSD, UPS for RTC, speakers and RS232/485
  • Detailed instructions are available on the website
Cons
  • Relatively small screen, large bezel, and hardness of 6 on the Mohs scale
  • Needs additional active cooling when running continuously at full capacity
Summary
The ED-HMI3020-070C HMI is a complete industrial HMI based on the Raspberry Pi 5 design with a 7-inch, ten-point touch LCD screen and RS232/485 communications, Gigabit Ethernet, 2.4/5 GHz Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth LE. A wealth of open-source and commercial software solutions and dedicated community A wealth of open source and commercial software solutions and a dedicated community provide top-notch solutions for this ARM platform.
In the past, the realization of industrial HMI devices was the exclusive privilege of a few well-known brands. Initially, cheap clones of varying quality were available and were only adopted by hobbyists for their own projects. Soon after, the first cost-effective, high-quality models appeared on the market, whose performance fully met the highest standards. However, their diffusion was somewhat limited. Although the market continued to evolve, there was still no way to understand the hardware and software of these HMI devices.
Until the big players in open source hardware came on the scene, the Raspberry Pi was the first to prove the value of its own platform in the industrial field, and even used it to implement its own factory control system. The traditional choice of PLC or Industrial PC is now PLC, Industrial PC or SBC. We may have been skeptical about SBCs in industry in 2020, but today we need not be, just think about one question: do you realize how much a platform with an ARM Cortex-A76 quad-core 2.4 GHz CPU with a Linux operating system and 4GB (or 8GB) of LPDDR4X RAM can accomplish in the field of industrial process control and monitoring? How much can be accomplished in the industrial process control and monitoring space? If you add a 7-inch 1024x600 resolution touch LCD screen and RS232/485 interface, that's the ED-HMI3020-070C HMI device we're reviewing today.
ED-HMI3020-070C HMI 
The ED-HMI3020-070C unit comes in a standard cardboard box with a labeled surface and is well secured with a hard foam inside. In addition to the display, the package comes with a few screws and a metal bracket for easy mounting to a panel.The HMI device itself is very compact and needs to be powered by a standard Raspberry Pi or other high-quality 5.1VDC/5A USB power supply. The HMI unit itself is very compact and requires access to a standard Raspberry Pi or other high quality 5.1VDC/5A USB power supply. With the Raspberry Pi 32-bit desktop operating system pre-installed, the unit is ready to use straight away.
Although the display supports 10-point touch, there is no virtual keyboard pre-installed, so you'll need to use a physical keyboard and mouse, at least initially.
Our model has a 7-inch display, but there's also a version with a 10.1-inch screen. Performance is essentially the same, except that the 7-inch screen is slightly brighter at 400 cd/m2, has a 1:800 contrast ratio, and a maximum resolution of 1024 x 600, while the 10.1-inch screen has a resolution of 1280 x 800. Both displays have a response time of 30 ms, and the viewing angle is 85°.
The effective display area measures 154 x 86 mm and is surrounded by a 1.5 cm wide black border that cannot be used to display content. This is common in the industrial sector, but it is certainly not as good as modern screen solutions for cell phones or tablets. The surface hardness of the display is 6H, which makes it susceptible to scratches and requires careful protection.
 
The back and edges of the display are protected by a metal casing surrounded by a 2 mm thick gray decorative border. This metal casing not only protects the display electronics, but also does not open during daily use. On the back of the housing there are two interface connectors, one for the power input and the other for the MIPI DSI interface.
On our prototype we didn't see the MIPI CSI connector, which is usually found only on models with an integrated 8 MP camera. On the back of the case there is a mounting bracket for the Raspberry Pi motherboard, which can be fixed with four screws. The case can be easily detached from the display and contains the single-board computer with associated electronics. The entire enclosure is made entirely of metal, and there are holes on the sides for air circulation, but there is no fan installed.
 
When looking at the metal case, the most striking feature is the large black passive heatsink with the Edatec logo on it. This heatsink completely covers the single-board computer and dissipates heat through the thermal interface material in contact with the CPU, memory and R1 chips.
The case also has interface holes for MIPI CSI, MIPI DSI and PCIe flat cables, a battery connector, UART interface and PoE pins. On the side there is also a GPIO connector, which is used for connecting expansion boards. Since the target application of this model is industrial HMI, this GPIO connector is mainly used for connecting the signals of the expansion board.

 

Shanghai Jinghong made this open passive cooling case from CNC machined metal and sells it as a standalone product. We can recognize it as the “Passive Cooling Open CNC Raspberry Pi 5 Case”.

The case consists of two metal heatsinks.

  • The upper heatsink is identical to the one used in the Edatec ED-HMI3020-070C HMI.

 

  • The lower heatsink is completely covered with thermal interface material and fits directly onto the bottom of the Raspberry Pi 5 motherboard, forming a sandwich structure.


Both heatsinks are held together by four long screws. The design does not require an additional fan and relies on natural convection in an open environment to dissipate heat.

Raspberry Pi 5 CNC open thermal enclosure

 
We know from previous tests that free airflow is enough to keep the processor within its operating temperature range, but we were skeptical about how well this passive solution would perform in a fully enclosed enclosure with additional SSDs inside, and the results showed that after 37 minutes there was still a heat restriction, with temperatures slowly rising and eventually reaching 80°C. As a result, the operating clock frequency was reduced to stop the temperature from rising further. As a result, the operating clock rate was reduced to stop the temperature from rising further, as in a closed chassis such temperatures could jeopardize the SSD and other electronic components.
The specified operating ambient temperature range is -25°C to 60°C. We conducted our heating tests at 30°C ambient temperature. We therefore recommend that hot air is adequately removed from the cabinet by following the openings in the HMI enclosure.
 
Inside the Raspberry Pi chassis, there is an additional expansion board that extends the communication capabilities of the Raspberry Pi 5 SBC.
For applications that require fast access to large amounts of data, it is important to add an SSD drive. The SSD drive is mounted at the bottom of the case, out of sight. Because SSDs naturally generate heat during operation, and because they do not have a thermal interface layer that contacts the bottom of the chassis, the heat generated by the SSDs is emitted directly into the air and not transferred to the bottom of the SBC motherboard.
The chassis supports M.2 NVMe SSDs in size 2242 and is compatible with SSDs in sizes 2260 and 2230, although the common 2280 size is too long to fit.
Depending on the model, the built-in SSD can be 128GB or 256GB in capacity, and there are also versions without an SSD. Tests show that the built-in SSDs are of good quality, with read and write speeds of 469MB/s and 404MB/s respectively, and even up to 890MB/s in PCIe Gen3 mode, with an access latency of 0.05ms.
However, whether or not to fully utilize this high hardware performance in industrial environments is a trade-off that the project team will have to make on a site-by-site basis.
On the right side of the chassis is a black plastic box containing a 4Ω 3W speaker. In our samples, this speaker made a constant popping sound during audio playback. We were unable to determine whether this was a hardware quality issue or a problem with some of the cables or connectors.
ED-HMI3020-070C Interior
 
A Power over Ethernet (PoE) module is soldered to this expansion board, which in addition provides the following features.
  • Additional buzzer
  • Audio inputs and outputs
  • Industrial grade RS232 and RS485 connectors
All of these signals are routed to the back of the chassis. A SuperCAP and CR1220 battery back-up have been added to the expansion board to ensure that the real-time clock (RTC) and the system clock remain stable even when the host power supply is disconnected.
 
 
On the left side face of the chassis the following components are arranged in order from left to right.
  • 4 indicators: a programmable green ACT indicator, a red PWR power indicator (illuminates when the HMI is powered on), and two green COM1 and COM2 indicators for visualizing UART communication.
  • Two 3.5mm stereo audio jacks, one for audio input and one for audio output.
  • One combined RS232/RS485 interface with 120Ω termination resistor, connected using Phoenix terminals.
The ED-HMI3020-070C HMI device has only one set of RS232/RS485 interfaces, which is sufficient for the use of the HMI device. If you need more communication interfaces and lines, you can consider choosing Shanghai Jingheng's CM4 Industrial device, which has more ports and communication interfaces, but no built-in display.
 
 
The connectors mentioned before are realized through expansion boards. Next up are the connectors on the Raspberry Pi 5 motherboard itself.
  • Two USB-A 2.0 ports with transfer speeds of 40/3.3MB/s.
  • Two USB-A 3.0 ports with transfer speeds of 394/322MB/s
  • One Gigabit Ethernet PoE port
In addition, the Raspberry Pi 5 and this HMI device also integrates 2.4GHz/5GHz Wi-Fi and 5.0 Bluetooth LE, which makes it ideal for edge computing applications, allowing seamless access to wired or wireless networks.
On the other side of the Raspberry Pi 5 motherboard, there are two micro HDMI ports and a USB-C power connector. micro HDMI ports can output 4K 60Hz high-definition video, so it is possible to connect two large-size information displays, and you can display the desktop on these two 4K screens individually or in a split screen. However, the physical structure of the micro HDMI port is relatively fragile and compact, which may cause some inconvenience in actual use.
ED-HMI3020-070C HMI Port
There is also a microSD card slot on the Raspberry Pi 5 motherboard for inserting memory cards. When we tested the speed of the microSD card, we used the Flexxon FxAdv II embedded computer and a microSD card for the Raspberry Pi. It performed well in our tests, with excellent read and write speeds and security features. Read speeds reached 93.3MB/s and write speeds reached 40MB/s with an access latency of only 0.42ms.
Right next to the microSD card slot is an opening for an on/off button. This button is finally integrated into the motherboard on the Raspberry Pi 5 model and requires a pointed object to trigger, avoiding the problem of accidental triggering.
 
In industrial environments, equipment must be properly grounded, which Shanghai Jingheng has taken into consideration when designing this HMI device. They specially designed a grounding contact on the metal shell, which effectively solves the static electricity problem and ensures the reliability and safety of this touch screen HMI device.
ED-HMI3020-070C HMI Software
The core of this HMI device is based on a Raspberry Pi 5 single board computer. Therefore, the pre-installed operating system should be Raspberry Pi OS, either 32-bit or 64-bit version, desktop or server version.
The best choice is to download the 64-bit version of Raspberry Pi OS desktop version, based on Debian 12 (bookworm), which can best utilize the hardware performance of ED-HMI3020-070C HMI.
However, after installing the original Raspberry Pi OS, additional drivers need to be added to support all the features of the HMI device expansion card. This customization process can be done through the detailed instructions and scripts provided on Shanghai Jingheng's website.
Using the official Raspberry Pi OS has two major benefits: it ensures that the system is always up-to-date, and it makes full use of the large number of applications and software packages designed for the Raspberry Pi. 32-bit versions are also backward compatible with more legacy applications.
The “Powered by Raspberry Pi” logo is therefore very important and appropriate for this HMI product.
 
 
For industrial applications, in addition to writing custom applications, there are some excellent paid and free software packages available, and FUXA, an open source SCADA system, is well suited for use on this platform.
You should also consider using openPLC as an SBC control package for writing standard ladder programs, and Node-RED as a low-code programming tool.
In the smart home sector, the most commonly used system is the Home Assistant Supervised system, which has a large number of off-the-shelf modules for different networked devices.
FUXA: https://github.com/frangoteam/FUXA
Node-RED: https://nodered.org/
 
Conclusion
ED-HMI3020-070C HMI is an open hardware and software in one product, which adopts modern SBC technology, powerful ARM processor core, and has the potential of artificial intelligence neural network application, which brings new possibilities for industrial control.
The Raspberry Pi platform has been widely recognized and certified in the field of machine and process automation. Its excellent software support, which has maintained backward compatibility from early development, has spawned a number of free and commercial management and visualization tools that have become industry standards.
The integration of industrial communication standards into the platform not only delivers outstanding performance, but also ensures safety and reliability, allowing it to be fully integrated into the production process.
In addition to the Raspberry Pi 4-based industrial PC product line, Shanghai Jingheng has also launched HMI devices based on the more powerful and modern Raspberry Pi 5 platform.
The ED-HMI3020-070C HMI product combines open, modern and powerful hardware and software, providing a brand new solution for industrial automation.
 
 
The ED-HMI3020-070C HMI device is priced between $200 and $300, depending on the memory capacity, size of the integrated SSD, and touch screen size. Performance and reliability are significantly better compared to similar products.
The hardware platform is widely supported by the open source community and commercial manufacturers. For example, CODESYS provides the “Codesys control for Raspberry Pi” software, which puts the platform on par with traditional industrial automation and process control hardware products.
In addition to industrial automation, the Raspberry Pi based HMI devices are used in a wide range of applications such as smart buildings, precision agriculture, monitoring and inspection, as well as embedded and edge computing solutions.