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.

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.

Round-trip InfluxDB Integration using OPC Router

Software Toolbox offers a variety of tools for integrating with InfluxDB.  Today we focus on OPC Router, a solution that enables visual workflow integration of traditional OT data sources with time-series databases such as InfluxDB.  The InfluxDB connector provides for reading and writing to InfluxDB (local or cloud-based). OPC Router's workflow engine provides visual data mapping, for ultimately extracting analytics and results from InfluxdB and making them available to the plant floor in OPC UA (or other) format.

If you have been following our blog for a while or have been exploring IoT platforms available in the market, you may know that the Google Cloud Platform combined with the Google IoT Core is a frequently used combination in the industry. Google has recently announced that it will be shutting down the Google IoT Core. In doing so, Google is forcing many of its Cloud Platform users to switch platforms.

In this blog post, we will review detailed information about the alternatives to the Google Cloud Platform that are available for use with all of the IoT capable products we provide, and how the change works.