Software Toolbox Technical Blog

Welcome to the Summer of IoT! As part of our Summer of IoT blog series, we spotlight practical ways to simplify and accelerate your digital transformation journey. In this second post, we’re diving into how OPC Router Docker Containers make industrial connectivity more flexible and easier to manage. Whether you're optimizing existing systems or exploring new technologies, our goal is to give you real-world strategies to make IoT adoption smarter and more efficient.

In industrial automation, efficiency is everything—whether it’s edge applications on the plant floor or in the solutions that keep operations running smoothly. For many, managing OPC Router installations has always meant dealing with servers, complex configurations, and time-consuming updates. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

In this blog, I’ll introduce you to OPC Router Docker Containers: what they are, why they matter, and how they can help you streamline your industrial connectivity with less hassle and greater flexibility. We hope you’ll learn:

• What OPC Router in a Docker container means
• Why it can save you time, simplify updates, and improve scalability
• How it fits into modern, flexible industrial architectures

Time is money. Let’s help you save both.

In the Industry 4.0 movement we are in today, companies going through the digital transformation process have to turn data into information and get it in the structures people want, how they want it and when they want it, to facilitate decisions that achieve the desired business results. Unifying data means accessing data where it lives, no matter the protocol required. MQTT is used extensively as a communication transport in many applications, and in this blog we'll show you an implementation.

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.

Continuing our Summer of IoT blog series, we'll delve into the exciting new release of Cogent DataHub V11. For those that may have missed our previous post on Cogent DataHub V11 Features to Be Excited About, the entirely revamped security profile provides a Secure out-of-the-box experience for V11 users that opens a variety of customized options. Today we take a deep dive into a part of the security improvements, and next month we’ll take a second deep dive into security.

Welcome back to our Summer of IoT blog series! This week, we are excited to announce the release of OmniServer Version 3.4.0.1 which in the professional edition, now includes MQTT client capability, which enables publishing data to MQTT Brokers such as the Cogent DataHub Smart Broker, HiveMQ, Mosquitto, and others.

Welcome back to our Summer of IoT blog series! In this third installment, we continue our journey through the fascinating world of IoT, delving deeper into the transformative technologies Software Toolbox has to offer for shaping our connected future. Today, we will be highlighting the TOP Server MQTT Client driver and demonstrating how it can effortlessly integrate real-time data from MQTT brokers into your existing industrial automation systems, such as your HMI, SCADA, MES, or Historian.

Welcome back to our Summer of IoT blog series! We hope that last week’s introduction to the series created excitement as we continue to explore how our IoT solutions can help you achieve even greater success with your Industry 4.0 and Digital Transformation initiatives.

In today's video blog, we will be integrating REST with MQTT by using OPC Router to connect to a RESTful API service and publish data to HiveMQ's MQTT Broker. Although we will use a public webservice to illustrate the concept, the steps we take would be the same for any OT or IT data source that can serve data via a RESTful web service/API.

MQTT continues to grow in popularity and implementation within the industrial automation community. For those who are still new and learning about this protocol, MQTT is a light-weight transfer protocol built around a publish/subscribe architecture. In simple terms, MQTT can be compared to a mail envelope, providing structure and a common appearance with a supported delivery system, while the actual content of that envelope can vary widely.

Because of the ambiguity of message content, implementations of MQTT can be utilized for various needs across segments in our industry, though the varying message content presents its own issues that are outside the scope of this article. There are multiple solutions for providing structure and standards around the message content that we will discuss in future posts.

This blog will primarily focus on the reliability of message delivery based on the concept of Quality of Service (QoS). We will be utilizing the Cogent DataHub to showcase these options, as it can act as both the MQTT Broker & Client. It is important to note that this information can be applied to various MQTT implementations, including other Software Toolbox product offerings with MQTT, such as OPC Router or the TOP Server MQTT client driver.