Software Toolbox Technical Blog

IoT, IIoT, MQTT, Big Data, and The Cloud—these tools and technologies are shaping the future of various industries. But how do you actually bring your critical process or control data into the cloud for real-time analytics, predictive maintenance, or smart manufacturing? That’s the most critical part, because in today’s connected world, data is power. Organizations are leveraging IoT and IIoT to optimize operations, predict maintenance issues before they happen, and unlock insights through advanced analytics in the cloud. That’s where Amazon AWS IoT Core and Cogent DataHub IoT Gateway come in.

Redundancy is a broad concept, as explored in our Demystifying Redundancy Blog. In this post, we narrow the focus on how to manage redundant OPC servers—a critical topic for ensuring reliable process communications to your HMI, SCADA, MES, Historian, etc. Redundancy is crucial because it ensures continuous operation and data integrity in the event of system failures, minimizing downtime and potential losses.

Simply deploying two OPC servers connected to your PLCs doesn’t make them redundant. We're sometimes asked about having the two OPC servers communicate and decide when to failover. That sounds good but has a flaw. If the client loses network connection to one OPC server but the two OPC servers are still communicating, and the HMI/SCADA doesn’t have any internal failover mechanism, then no failover will occur.

In today’s industrial environments, securing and streamlining data communication is essential. If you're not familiar with OPC Router, it’s a powerful software solution that integrates various industrial, business, and IoT data sources. With its drag-and-drop visual workflows, scalable configuration templates, and platform-independent browser-based interface, OPC Router helps you connect systems quickly and efficiently.

When combined with Entra ID (formerly Azure Active Directory), OPC Router gains enhanced security and user management features, making it ideal for modern industrial setups. But how do you deploy this combination in a modern environment like a Docker container?

In this blog post, we’ll break down the concepts of Docker and Entra ID and guide you through implementing them in your OPC Router system. But before diving into the specifics, it’s important to understand the foundational terms.

If you've been keeping up with our Summer of IoT blog series, you've likely noticed our in-depth exploration of Software Toolbox solutions and the use of MQTT for IoT applications. In this latest installment of the series, our spotlight shifts to the OPC Data Client development toolkit. When speaking about IoT, OPC UA is a major player, which is why our focus for this post will be to delve into the integration of OPC UA PubSub (publish/subscribe) and how it leverages MQTT as its conduit for message transmission.

In the ever-changing landscape of industrial control, the ability to establish connections and facilitate efficient data exchange between different technologies is crucial. With digital transformation, the industry requires robust integration solutions more than ever before. If you’ve been keeping up with our previously released OPC Router blogs, you're already aware that OPC Router is a flexible middleware solution that provides an array of functionalities for exchanging and integrating data across different technologies. It facilitates seamless interoperability by acting as a connection point between various data sources, protocols, and applications such as OPC DA/Classic, OPC UA, databases, REST, ERP, SAP, and more with a visual workflow editor, templates, and imports for scalable configuration.

If you are new to OPC Router and want to learn more, our OPC Router Learning Resources are a great place to get started.

Knowing when your systems are online and functional is key to the success of your business. In large operations, it could be someone's full-time responsibility to mitigate problems and fix them when they inevitably occur. This makes it critical for the right people to be alerted in a timely fashion so they can take corrective action. To facilitate this need, what if you could also have real-time updates from your process and other systems through email notifications? Rather than rely on human detection and reaction, what if your actual processes and business systems could message you via email when a connection goes down (possibly a critical system is down, or a tank is approaching a critical level)?

In this blog post, we'll cover the steps necessary to use OPC Router V4 to integrate your variety of connections with email notifications, empowering you to stay informed about downtime occurrences and expedite critical decision-making processes for your business.

If you’re an existing user or you’ve been keeping up with our previously released Cogent DataHub blogs, you’re already aware that Cogent DataHub is renowned for its extensive connectivity options to industrial data systems, but most importantly its secure, high performance, scalable, firewall, DMZ, & proxy friendly data transfer within premises and to/from the cloud. However, it’s worth emphasizing that DataHub’s connectivity includes MQTT, IoT, OPC DA, OPC UA, OPC UA Alarms & Conditions, OPC Classic Alarms & Events, Modbus, Excel, ODBC & more. These methods of connectivity help users realize that with DataHub, data has the freedom to seamlessly and securely traverse across various platforms. We truly believe that "once the data is in DataHub, it can go anywhere, securely".

In this blog post, I'll provide insight into using DataHub’s Transform property to manipulate data that is being logged to a database table. To follow along with this blog, as a prerequisite, you will need to have an ODBC database configured and have DataHub set up to be writing to that database. For more information on connecting and writing to a database, please read our blog “DataHub – 5 Quick Steps to Writing to a Database Table”. Unlike loggers that only work with OPC data sources, DataHub’s capability to securely tunnel data and aggregate from diverse sources besides OPC empowers many different types of applications.

If you've been keeping up with our previously released Cogent DataHub blogs, you're already aware that Cogent DataHub is renowned for its extensive connectivity. However, it's worth emphasizing that DataHub's connectivity includes MQTT, IoT, OPC DA, OPC UA, OPC UA Alarms & Conditions, OPC Classic Alarms & Events, Modbus, Excel, ODBC & more. These methods of connectivity help users realize that with DataHub, data has the freedom to seamlessly traverse across various platforms. We truly believe that "once the data is in DataHub, it can go anywhere, securely".

Developers that have leveraged our OPC Data Client toolkit for their custom OPC client development needs know that we’ve historically supported Python as a COM development language, but that had always come with limitations and a desire from our user base for a more modern option.

In the latest V2023.2 release, OPC Data Client now adds support for Python.NET, while also announcing the deprecation of the older COM approach. The newer Python.NET option offers many advantages including, but not limited to:

• Modern, maintained Python.NET package (pythonnet), instead of the older pypiwin32 package
• Added performance and reliability that comes from using the OPC Data Client .NET API over the COM API
• Access to .NET features, such as generics, methods overloads, and callbacks
• Easier coding

With the added support for Python.NET, we have also added more than 270 Python.NET examples to make it as easy as possible for our users to learn how this works within our product. PyCharm is now listed as one of the primary development environments.

Now that we have a basic understanding of the advantages that Python.NET has over its predecessor, let’s see it in action!