Are you up for a challenge? Yokogawa and Make: Projects are.

Yokogawa, a world leader in industrial automation, has partnered with Make: Projects to give makers all over the world the chance to build their dream projects.
Make: Projects, powered By ProjectBoard is a joint venture between Make and Engineering.com. Launched in April 2020, the site aims to connect creators and problem solvers through their projects. The community offers a place for makers to organize and share their ideas online while collaborating with others in private or public groups. So far, there are over 25,000 Make: Projects members who have produced around 8,000 projects globally.
Using Yokogawa’s e-RT3 Plus, makers must build original and creative manufacturing or production equipment. A challenge of a new kind. In turn, the company will select ten lucky entries and ship the maker an e-RT3 Plus, a $5,000 industrial AI platform/controller.
Yokogawa developed the e-RT3 Plus, a third generation in the series, in 2015 to be used in various manufacturing and production equipment used worldwide in the electronics, process, automotive, aerospace and consumer goods industries.
The hardware can withstand temperatures from 0 °C to 55 °C in factories, plants, and outdoor areas. It features an ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore 866 MHz (Dual-Core), Gigabit Ethernet, DDR3 SDRAM memory, Flash memory, operating system (OS) drivers, a PCI interface, and an internal battery.
The industrial AI Platform helps meet product specifications, develop control logics, improve development and support various applications. It can provide logging, monitoring, process control, in-line measurement, intelligent gateway, machine control, and others at the same time by operating two cores in parallel.
The F3RP70-2L runs on Ubuntu, a commonly used Linux distribution, and supports Python, a general-purpose programming language widely used for AI development and data processing. The F3RP70-2L also supports direct access from Python to existing Yokogawa made I/O modules, and is a new concept controller that is easy to handle for IT engineers accustomed to programming in Python. As a result, the F3RP70-2L is more versatile and enables faster development.
Certified by Microsoft, Azure Edge Managed, and Amazon Web Services, AWS IoT Greengrass, the application uses the cloud to communicate data from the software to the device and vice versa. This includes service, user management, IP address, date and time, startup script, memory information, log display, and operation status. The data transfer rate was improved from 100 Mbps to 1 Gbps to allow for heavier traffic.
So, how do you get your hands on this captivating power tool? Makers have until February 8th to submit their product ideas. Yokogawa will choose the finalists who get to build their project using the e-RT3 Plus on February 12. For more information on the contest, visit Make: Projects’ website.