There are five new products to announce this issue. First is RFID cloud connectivity enabled by OPC UA from Siemens. Next is IO-Link and OPC UA connectivity from Comtrol. Softing announces commercial licenses for the open-source .NET OPC UA stack. Integration Objects introduces a proxy between OPC UA servers and OPC DA clients. Finally, Unified Automation has expanded their UaGateway with AMQP and MQTT capabilities.
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Connecting RFID to cloud systems via OPC UA
With the launch of new firmware release V3, the Siemens Simatic RF600 RFID system now supports the open interface OPC UA. The new firmware allows devices to be connected to the cloud-based open Internet of Things (IoT) operating system MindSphere – for instance over the industrial IoT gateway Ruggedcom RX1400 with MindConnect or with the cloud gateway MindConnect Nano. Simatic RF600 acts as a link between the real and digital world and it´s the first RFID system that supplies data to MindSphere. Its platform-independent interface enables seamless communication with products and software which supports OPC UA. Project engineering takes place via a web interface in the browser. Fields of application include production, logistics and asset management. As a key standard on the way towards digitalization, OPC UA offers high performance and proven security mechanisms, and is considered by Siemens as a crucial element of any complete solution from the sensor through to the cloud.
OPC-UA connectivity on IO-Link Master
Comtrol Corporation, a manufacturer of industrial device connectivity products and the official North American IO-Link Competency Center, announced the availability of OPC-UA support with its MultiLink™ technology on its IO-Link Master family of products.
OPC Unified Architecture (OPC UA) is a machine to machine communication protocol developed for industrial automation. OPC UA allows customers to communicate with industrial equipment and systems for data connection and control, freely use an open standard, cross-platform, implement service-oriented architecture (SOA) software and utilize robust security.
Comtrol’s MultiLink™ technology allows IO-Link Masters to simultaneously provide sensors process data to PLC platforms, while also sending the sensors ISDU Service and Process data via Modbus TCP or OPC-UA upstream to IIoT/Industrie 4.0 Cloud solutions or factory SCADA systems. Comtrol’s IO-Link Masters are available in three industrial Ethernet protocols: EtherNet/IP, Modbus TCP, and PROFINET, which are all capable of running OPC UA with MultiLink™.
Commercial Licenses for OPC UA .NET Standard Stack
Softing Industrial announces a commercial license for the OPC UA .NET Standard Stack. The OPC UA .NET Standard Stack has been developed by Microsoft, and was contributed as open source project to the OPC Foundation GitHub in June 2016. This announcement follows the OPC Foundation’s recent statement about Microsoft’s contribution of the stack.
The OPC UA .NET Standard Stack is targeting the .NET Standard Library. .Net Standard allows developing apps that run on all common platforms available today, without requiring platform-specific modifications. Furthermore, the .NET Standard stack adds security features and supports cloud applications and services.
At the Edge of Industrial IoT: UA Integration
Integration Objects announced today the release of its OPC UA Proxy product.
Integration Objects’ OPC UA Proxy is OPC UA Wrapper’s component for OPC UA to OPC DA bridging. The OPC UA Proxy is a plug and play solution that enables OPC DA (Data Access) clients to communicate with OPC UA (Unified Architecture) servers. This OPC UA based product acts as a high performance gateway between OPC UA servers connected to the network and any OPC DA client applications.
“At the edge of Industrial Internet of Things, companies are more and more concerned about the fast migration to the Industrie 4.0. Integration Objects ensures a secure and powerful way to OPC UA technology adoption. As a matter of fact, OPC UA Proxy facilitates data bridging between classic OPC Clients and OPC UA Servers.“
OPC UA Meets IoT
Unified Automation integrates OPC UA data sources into IoT solutions without programming
The growing number of devices and machines with OPC Unified Architecture (UA) interfaces, as well as the large installed base of “classic” OPC products, can now easily be integrated into cloud and IoT platforms, like Azure IoT Suite. Unified Automation’s UaGateway offers an easy configure-only solution, without changes on installed systems and without time- consuming programming.
Being already a well-established solution for integrating different OPC interfaces into a single common database and “translating” between different OPC standards, UaGateway has now been extended with the IoT protocols Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP) and Message Queue Telemetry Transport (MQTT). This allows the publication of any OPC data into cloud and IoT platforms simply by configuration.
“UaGateway now closes the gap between the large installed base of OPC devices and new upcoming products with fully integrated IoT protocols”, said Jürgen Boxberger, CEO of Unified Automation GmbH “The UaGateway provides industrial grade communication infrastructure for multi-vendor Edge Cloud and Analytics applications.”