Industrial systems rarely live in a single communication world. This project addressed a real need: getting modern Ethernet-based equipment to coexist with legacy infrastructure using Power Line Communication.
The core is a Raspberry Pi Compute Module, handling protocol translation, data routing, and system supervision. Ethernet on one side, PLC on the other — the gateway bridges two environments with very different behaviors in terms of timing, noise, protocol structure, and deployment constraints.
What makes this kind of device interesting is that the value isn’t just in the hardware. The software architecture — buffering, message validation, fault handling, watchdog strategy — matters just as much as the electronics. And in an industrial field context, long-term stability is just as important as the feature set.
