vNode Amazon Web Services (AWS) Module
Connect Your Plant’s PLCs Or Control Devices To Amazon Web Services
vNode is an Industrial IoT Gateway designed to gather data from your facility and deliver it to virtually any destination in the Cloud. Our MQTT Module works as an MQTT Publisher that will take data from any of your devices, convert it into MQTT and publish it.
Paradigm Of Use
Liam James works for the IT department of a well-known water distribution company. Liam got a project assigned where he was asked to collect the data from the Siemens PLCs located in the pump stations, (around 116 stations), and send to a Data Storage services the company has in Amazon Web Services; so once the data is stored the company could do analysis and take decisions.
Liam faced 2 main challenges.
The pump stations are located in remote places and he will need to use 4G or 3G connectivity to send the data to the Amazon Cloud.
Liam is from IT, he knows almost nothing about how to get data from a Siemens PLC.
By investigation Liam found out that MQTT is a very low band with consumption protocol, designed to send data to cloud services without being resource intensive, plus is tested and has a lot of implementations worldwide. Therefore MQTT looks like a good choice to send the data UP to Amazon Web Services.
Liam also found out that PLCs are not IoT devices, this means a PLC cannot talk a protocol like MQTT, so, he needs a way to convert the data from Siemens PLC to MQTT.
This is where vNode comes in handy, Liam decided to download vNode’s free trial license and choose to use the Linux version, so he could install it on a small devices and put it right next to the PLC. This device would be connected to the PLC and also connected to the 4G or 3G network.
Since Liam doesn’t know much about PLCs he requested our technical support so vNode staff showed him how to do the configurations, how to connect to the Siemens PLCs, how to choose the data and how to Publish it to MQTT.
After the testing Liam recommended his company that this was the best solution for this case and decided to roll it out to all pump stations.
Today Liam can manage all 116 vNodes from his office desk because vNode has remote management, diagnostic tools, and a friendly GUI.
Do you have a similar need like Liam’s, if that is the case go ahead, download our free trial and contact us for assistance we will be happy to help with the solution.
Share Your Industrial Data To Any Broker In The Market
- Provide M2M communications between your PLCs and IT applications.
- Publish and subscribe to any topic from your AWS broker platform.
- Implement QoS in any message.
- Provide security levels by using SSL/TLS, certificates or user authentication.
How Does It Do It?
- Collect data from data sources like: OPC DA, OPC UA, Modbus Devices, Siemens PLCs, Text Files, CSV Files, Sensors, IOs, and many other.
- Treats the data as you desire, escalations, calculations, aliasing, hierarchies, etc.
- Converts the data to MQTT and publishes it into any MQTT Broker, could be local or could be in cloud.
But Really… What Protocols Can You Combine?
- Modbus to MQTT
- Siemens to MQTT
- OPC DA to MQTT
- OPC UA to MQTT
- ASCII to MQTT
- TXT to MQTT
- CSV to MQTT
- Allen Bradley to MQTT
- Omron to MQTT
- GE Fanuc to MQTT
