Opto 22 enhances groov® Industrial Edge Appliance with OPC-UA drivers for Allen-Bradley and Siemens PLCs, plus MQTT

Opto 22 enhances groov® Industrial Edge Appliance with OPC-UA drivers for Allen-Bradley® and Siemens® PLCs, plus MQTT

New additions position groov as a complete edge appliance for industrial automation and Internet of Things applications

Temecula, CA - October 24, 2017 – Industrial automation manufacturer and Industrial Internet of Things tools developer Opto 22 today announced a new version of groov, embedding key IIoT technologies MQTT and OPC-UA drivers directly into its industrial edge appliance. Added to the groov View software for web and mobile visualization, and the open-source Node-RED development environment, the new release offers engineers, technicians, and developers a comprehensive set of tools for edge deployment in industrial environments.
These new embedded capabilities are made possible through forging close partnerships with technology providers Inductive Automation® and Cirrus Link Solutions®, and are part of the Ignition Edge Onboard™ program.

A typical use case for the new groov edge appliance is gathering data from plant floor devices or from remote plants. A customer places groov near a machine or process, uses the built-in drivers to connect to existing control systems, analyzes the data, and publishes the results back to a central server or broker on premises or in the cloud. Applications like Ignition Enterprise or any MQTT/Sparkplug-compliant software can subscribe to the data.

This scenario eliminates complex networking architectures like VPNs, firewall configurations, and remote desktop software, because all communications to the broker use a secure outbound connection from control systems, whether publishing data or subscribing to it. Additionally, because groov is a complete computing appliance, a PC is not required.

Other use cases for groov:
•    A controls technician who needs to see Allen-Bradley CompactLogix™ variables on her smartphone for access from anywhere she is located
•    An OEM machine builder whose machine must periodically send operational data to a central location for predictive analysis and machine learning
•    A SCADA engineer who needs to efficiently control and acquire data from a large number of geographically dispersed locations over a cellular or other bandwidth-constrained network
•    A facilities engineer who needs energy use and HVAC status data transmitted to a cloud database for historical logging

Ignition Edge in the groov appliance includes both a built-in OPC UA server and MQTT module. The built-in OPC UA server includes drivers to popular PLC brands, including Rockwell Automation® Allen-Bradley PLCs, Siemens S7 PLCs, and Modbus® TCP devices. Other drivers are available at additional cost. Embedding these drivers and OPC UA at the edge eliminates the cost and complexity of commissioning and maintaining a Microsoft® Windows®-based computer for translating PLC and device data to OPC UA, the only method available until now. MQTT is a bi-directional, lightweight event- and message-oriented transport protocol with a publish/subscribe architecture. This architecture decouples devices from applications, allowing users to reduce reliance on traditional IT networking resources. MQTT’s pub/sub architecture also reduces network traffic, because data is published and sent only when it changes. Supported over the MQTT transport is Sparkplug, a freely available, MQTT-based payload definition for industrial applications, which greatly simplifies implementation by defining topic namespaces and payload, and managing the state of devices in the field.

About Opto 22
Opto 22 designs and manufactures industrial control products and Internet of Things platforms that bridge the gap between information technology (IT) and operations technology (OT). Based on a core design philosophy of leveraging open, standards-based technology, Opto 22 products are deployed worldwide in industrial automation, process control, building automation, industrial refrigeration, remote monitoring, and data acquisition applications. For more information visit www.opto22.com.

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