Luckfox Lyra PLC Runs Linux on an $84 Industrial Board

Industrial control has spent decades split between rugged programmable logic controllers that cost real money and hobbyist boards that were never meant for a DIN rail. The Luckfox Lyra PLC is a determined attempt to occupy the middle: a proper Linux computer with proper industrial I/O, for $83.99.

• SoC: Rockchip RK3506B with three Arm Cortex-A7 cores at up to 1.2GHz, 512MB DDR3L, 8GB eMMC
• Industrial I/O: RS232, a shared RS422/RS485 port, one CAN interface, and two 10A relay channels rated 250V AC or 30V DC
• Networking: Two 10/100Mbps Ethernet ports, Wi-Fi 6 on 2.4GHz, Bluetooth 5.2
• Price: $83.99 standard, $89.99 for the 802.3af PoE version

Why Industrial Interfaces Still Matter

A lot of what makes factory-floor hardware expensive is not compute — it is the unglamorous interface work. Isolated serial, termination resistors, relay contacts that survive inductive loads, and a wide input voltage range that tolerates whatever the cabinet is actually supplying.

The Lyra PLC covers that list. The RS422/RS485 port is selectable by wiring, hardware switches handle 120-ohm termination, and the two relay channels are rated for 10A. Power comes in anywhere from 7V to 24V DC, or over PoE on the pricier variant. There is a 1.9-inch 170 x 320 colour touchscreen on the front for local status, which is the sort of thing that saves a laptop trip to the cabinet.

This is a familiar move from Luckfox. The $21 Luckfox Lume industrial SBC took a similar swing at the bottom of the market earlier this year; the Lyra PLC pushes upmarket into controller territory.

What Can You Actually Program It With?

This is where the Linux base earns its keep. The board supports C, C++, Python, and Java development directly, and it is compatible with both Node-RED for graphical automation flows and OpenPLC for IEC 61131-3-style ladder and structured-text programming.

That combination is unusual at this price. A traditional PLC gives you IEC 61131-3 and little else. A generic single board computer gives you Linux and no industrial I/O. Getting both means an automation engineer can write ladder logic where ladder logic belongs and drop into Python where it does not — on one 512MB device.

Remote access is handled the modern way, with support for Tailscale, WireGuard, ZeroTier and similar overlay networks, plus a browser-based management interface. For distributed deployments — pump stations, greenhouses, remote monitoring — that removes a whole category of VPN plumbing.

Where the Trade-Offs Sit

Three Cortex-A7 cores at 1.2GHz and 512MB of RAM is a modest budget by 2026 standards, and the 100Mbps Ethernet ports will feel dated next to the gigabit and 2.5GbE we see on boards like the AAEON PICO-ADN2 Pico-ITX SBC. For control workloads that is largely irrelevant — deterministic I/O and uptime matter far more than throughput — but it does rule the Lyra out for anything with real compute ambitions.

The 8GB of eMMC is a welcome touch, giving you a proper root filesystem rather than an SD card waiting to corrupt itself.

At $83.99 through Luckfox directly or Waveshare, this lands in the territory where a maker can justify buying one to learn on, and a small integrator can justify a shelf of spares. That accessibility is what keeps making industrial single board computers more interesting every year.

Sources: LinuxGizmos — August 15, 2026; Luckfox product page — August 2026; Waveshare listing — August 2026.