Industrial IoT (IIoT)—sometime referred to as Industrial Internet—is one of the key elements of the Industry 4.0 model.

Nowadays, the implementation of need to implement IIoT solutions, associated with machines that are already in operation, are is pretty common. This step is usually part of a broader plan that is a migration path toward the Industry 4.0 model. Traditional industrial machines and systems, which were conceived and deployed before the introduction of Industry 4.0 concept, often have no Internet network connectivity. As such, it is usually challenging to find '''non-intrusive retrofitting solutions to connect them to the Internet'''.

This Technical Note describes a real-world example in which the versatility of [[:Category:SBC_Lynx|SBC Lynx ]] was leveraged to address this issue. A customized industrial gateway was built on the base of [[XUELK-AN-005:_Implementing_an_Industrial_IoT_gateway/supervisor|SBC Lynxthis implementation]]. This device, which is able to perform '''non-intrusive data collecting from a legacy industrial machine''', is part of a '''larger data collecting and monitoring system''' that will be illustrated in the following sections as well.

===The legacy industrial machine===The legacy machine is powered by an embedded system that was designed by DAVE Embedded Systems years ago and that consists of several boards. Two of them are more relevant for the purposes of this discussion. They are named "''Single Board Computer" '' and "''I/O board" '' as shown in the following picture.

The former ''Single Board Computer'' is built upon [[:Category:SBC-AXEL|SBC-AXEL]] off-the-shelf board. It runs Android 6 (MarshmellowMarshmallow) and implements the high-level business logic besides the capacitive touch-screen based Man-Machine Interface (MMI). The latter integrates It is a bunch blatant example of application-specific I/O interfaces. The two boards are connected with an RS485 link on which data are exchanged through a proprietary protocolDAVE Embedded Systems' capability to change and adapt Android to embedded platforms devoted to industrial applications.

With regard to the gateway, it acts as The ''I/O board'' integrates a traffic sniffer on the legacy machine side. It is connected bunch of application-specific I/O ports required to interface the RS485 link and it "eavesdrops" all the traffic flowing through this channel. As it is aware electromechanical parts of the protocol used, it extracts each data from the packets exchanged. On the cloud side, the gateway uploads each extracted data along with an associated timestampmachinery.

The two boards are connected with an RS485 link on which data are exchanged through a proprietary protocol. ===The industrial gateway===The gateway is powered by an embedded Linux distribution, which was tailored for such applications. On the legacy machine side, the gateway acts as a traffic sniffer. It is connected to the RS485 link and eavesdrops all the traffic flowing through this channel. As it is aware of the protocol used, it can parse the exchanged packets and extract data from them. On the cloud side, the gateway uploads every extracted piece of data to the NoSQL database, along with an associated timestamp.  It is worth remembering that the '''extraction of data to be uploaded to the cloud is a non-intrusiveprocess''': to implement this solution, '''neither no hardware nor /software modifications of the legacy machine were required'''.

As stated before, the gateway uploads collected data to the cloud, specifically onto a NoSQL database. The diagram in the previous section shows a solution based on that makes use of the IBM Bluemix/Watson platform. The With regard to the uploading process, the software running on the gateway is '''platform independent''', however. Consequently, '''virtually any platform could be used''' (i.e. Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, KaaIoT Technologies Kaa, etc.).

With regard to the basic services, the platform provides the followingsseveral features including but not limited to:

===Real-time data visualization===The following screenshot shows, for example, a portion of outcome is a data stream, visualized in real-chart showing the selected variables within the selected timewindow. The screenshot refers to a browser running on a PC platform  [[File:DAVE-IIoT-advanced-query2.png|thumb|center|600px|Historical data visualization]]

The same [[File:DAVE-IIoT-advanced-query3.png|thumb|center|600px|Historical data visualization is available on mobile devices as well. For instance, this pictures shows a screenshot captured on an Android smartphone.: customizing chart properties]]