Manufacturing &
Automation Solutions

Edge AI runs the analysis where the data is produced – on the machine, not in a data centre. The most common use is machine vision: a camera image is classified or measured within milliseconds, fast enough to reject a part on the line. Beyond inspection, Edge AI supports predictive maintenance from vibration and current signatures, robot guidance, and quality analytics across a production run. Processing locally keeps the latency predictable, keeps production data inside the plant, and keeps the line running when the network does not.

Portwell industrial platforms carry the interfaces that factory protocols run on: industrial Ethernet for PROFINET, EtherCAT and Modbus TCP, serial ports for Modbus RTU, CAN bus for drives and vehicles, and digital I/O for direct machine signals. On top of that, OPC UA and MQTT are the usual paths from the machine to higher-level systems. Which protocol stack is installed depends on the application; the hardware provides the interfaces, and the DMS services can add a specific I/O set where the standard configuration does not fit.

Automated Optical Inspection (AOI) is the camera-based check of a part or assembly against a reference. A lit camera station captures the part, and software decides whether placement, solder joints, dimensions, print or surface are within tolerance. It is standard in electronics manufacturing and is spreading into general assembly. AOI is a computing problem as much as an optical one: the images have to be captured, processed and judged at line speed, which is why these stations use GPU- or NPU-accelerated platforms with enough PCIe lanes for frame grabbers.

It depends on how much inference the line needs. For a single camera and a pre-trained model, a compact NVIDIA Jetson-based system is usually enough and stays fanless. For multiple cameras, high resolution or heavier models, a GPU-expandable industrial system gives the headroom and the PCIe slots for frame grabbers. If the vision station is built into your own machine, an embedded board or Computer-on-Module with a carrier board designed around your I/O is often the better fit. Our application engineers size this against the actual workload.

Because a machine outlives a consumer computing platform several times over. Once an equipment design is qualified – mechanically, electrically and often against a safety standard – any change to the computing board can mean a requalification. Consumer and office platforms disappear from the market within a year or two, which forces exactly that. Embedded boards with a multi-year roadmap and managed revision control keep the qualified design buildable, so a change is a planned event rather than a surprise.

Yes – that is what the Design & Manufacturing Services are for. They cover custom carrier boards and I/O configurations, custom chassis and mechanical integration, BIOS and firmware customization, pre-loaded OS images and private labelling. Prototyping, engineering validation and system testing happen in-house, and production scales from pilot runs to volume with quality control, traceability and long-term supply support.