In this blogpost, we are going to describe a reference architecture for deploying an open-source Industrial IoT edge gateway. This pretends to be a reference application that you can clone and deploy to accelerate the digitalization of your industry. With this Industrial IoT gateway running on the edge you can augment any industry and digitalize the plant floor, acquire data from multiple sources (e.g. Modbus, OPC UA or SCADA among others) and expose this data through an MQTT broker to multiple services in the edge.
Thank you for dropping in an Opto 22 #RIO into your architecture diagram! Just a heads up that it is heavily underutilized in this drawing because we can run Influx, Grafana, or brokers inside the RIO itself. Maybe it is time for us to start looking at putting Balena inside the RIO? We would be open to that conversation.
If you’d rather just use the RIO as simple I/O you can do that to as you mentioned with OPCUA but also via MQTT, RestAPI, Node-RED nodes, or even Modbus/TCP.
Again that you for posting this excellent article and I hope that we can discuss a closer collaboration between our two companies.
Rene Gamero
Opto 22
Hi Marc, this is a really cool ref architecture! I wondered if you could explain more about the integration of the PLC running a Modbus server to Node Red. I ask because I have a PLC to which I want to deploy a similar solution however the PLC vendor has told me that I need to use their specific gateway which of course ingests data into a proprietary database to which I have no access to easily extract/enrich data. I know that I can run a Modbus server on the PLC but how do I map the data from devices to some kind of data model that I can then use to show data upstream e.g. in Grafana? Thanks for your help!
