XUELK-TN-003: Industrial IoT (IIoT) and a Non-intrusive Retrofitting Solution for Data Collecting and Monitoring

Info Box Applies to AXEL ULite Applies to SBC Lynx

History

Version	Date	Notes
1.0.0	October 2018	First public release

Keywords: Industry 4.0, Industrial IoT (IIoT), data collecting

Introduction

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

Source: Boston Consulting Group

Nowadays, the implementation of IIoT solutions, associated with machines that are already in operation, are 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 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 SBC Lynx was leveraged to address this issue. A customized industrial gateway was built on the base of SBC Lynx. 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.

System overview

The following diagram depicts the architecture of the whole data collecting and monitoring system.

System overview

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.

Hardware/software architecture of the legacy machine

The former is built upon SBC-AXEL off-the-shelf board. It runs Android 6 (Marshmallow) and implements the high-level business logic besides the capacitive touch-screen based Man-Machine Interface (MMI). The latter integrates a bunch of application-specific I/O interfaces. The two boards are connected with an RS485 link on which data are exchanged through a proprietary protocol.

With regard to the gateway, on the legacy machine side, it 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 exchange packets and extract data from them. On the cloud side, the gateway uploads to the NoSQL database every extracted piece of data along with an associated timestamp.

It is worth remembering that the extraction of data to be uploaded to the cloud is a non-intrusive process: to implement this solution, no hardware/software modifications of the legacy machine were required.

Cloud architecture and services

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 the IBM Bluemix/Watson platform. The software running on the gateway is platform independent, however. Consequently, virtually any platform could be used (Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, KaaIoT Technologies Kaa, etc.).

The following picture illustrates in more detail the cloud architecture.

Cloud architecture

Basic services

With regard to the basic services, the platform provides the followings:

• Historical data visualization with advanced queries
• Real-time data visualization
• Programmable alarms and notifications.

Real-time data visualization

The following screenshot shows, for example, a portion of a data stream, visualized in real-time. The screenshot refers to a browser running on a PC platform.

TBD

The same visualization is available on mobile devices as well. For instance, this pictures shows a screenshot captured on an Android smartphone.

TBD