Every morning last week I listened to presentations from OPC Day–which was actually a week. Once again this year was a conference reporting on a vast amount of work done by volunteers from numerous companies that push forward the cause of interoperability in manufacturing/industrial data communications. Earlier this year, I visited the ODVA annual general meeting. This virtual conference by the OPC Foundation is well worth a listen.
There were two or three presentations on MQTT where speakers tried mightily to tread the line between simplifying and explaining how these are not competing technologies and yet evangelizing the benefits of OPC UA over MQTT versus Sparkplug B. The presentations were balanced for the most part. OPC UA is a substantial information model. MQTT is a lightweight transport protocol widely adopted by IT. Sparkplug B is a lightweight information model requiring some extra defining work by the integrators but keeps overhead low. Obviously, there is a place for each.
I’ve added a list of videos from the OPC Foundation YouTube channel for your viewing pleasure:
Day 1: https://youtu.be/2i54Q-2IvCQ
Day 2: https://youtu.be/CsXagNmWWjY
Day 3: https://youtu.be/8XuTAcG598o
Day 4: https://youtu.be/ezSRRaG1fAE
Day 5: https://youtu.be/ZzS7Z8a7c1I
