Dear colleagues,
Another exciting edition of the OPC Connect newsletter has arrived. The OPC Foundation has been busy these past few months and the remainder of 2018 is shaping up to be no different. Learn about all of the activities, past and present, happening in North America and Europe, our new IPR Policy 2.1, and how to get involved with the OPC Foundation.
Thank you for taking time out from your busy day to read this edition of the OPC Connect newsletter.
The OPC Foundation welcomes Volkswagen, the German car manufacturing major as an OPC Foundation member. The OPC Foundation is also pleased to announce record membership growth with Volkswagen being the six hundredth active OPC Foundation member.
In a joint effort, 17 partners and VDW created umati (universal machine tool interface). umati is based on an OPC UA companion specification. OPC UA was chosen as the ideal communication platform for different industrial devices due to its open data model.
When the OPC Foundation was asked by we.conect to take part in the first Industrial IoT Hackathon, we were very excited and jumped on board right away. Participants of the IIoT Hackathon had to find a real-world problem and come up with a solution in 24 hours. In most of the cases, OPC UA technology was used.
Every newsletter we have been trying to discuss some of the new testing and information model testing work that has been accomplished since the last newsletter. We do not have a new companion spec to write about for this letter, but we do have some updates on some of the other groups we have talked about in the past.
Aker BP will begin using state-of-the-art real time solutions based on standardized and open technology (OPC UA) for industrial communication in the coming year. The system will be installed on multiple on- and offshore installations and represents a significant step towards autonomous drilling operations.
MTConnect is a widely adopted standard for machine tools, robots, and other manufacturing equipment as confirmed at the IMTS show last month. A new MTConnect – OPC UA Companion Specification is set for release before the end of the year.
Read this Case Study to learn how OPC UA enabled RFID readers use secure elements for protected communication. Balluff and Wibu-Systems teamed up as part of the German IUNO (IT Security in the Industrie 4.0) project to further secure Auto-ID (and OPC UA) enabled devices with help from Unified Automation.
Softing Industrial’s new product dataFEED Secure Integration Server enables the highly secure and efficient integration of data from automation networks into innovative IoT solutions. It is suitable for use in edge architectures as well as in cloud applications. dataFEED Secure Integration Server is now commercially available.
The largest independent manufacturer of electric mirror adjusting actuators and electric power-folding mirror actuators had a problem: their PCs would crash when due to a buggy Excel plugin that monitored productivity metrics. The solution was to implement Cogent’s DataHub which speaks both OPC UA and Excel.