by Gary Mintchell | Sep 13, 2023 | Automation, Edge, Industrial Computers
Are you using an Arduino anywhere? I keep it on my to do list that never gets done. I’ve had all these Halloween ideas that atrophy in my mind. I’ve believed for a long time that there must be many industrial uses for a good edge compute platform at low cost.
Here is news about Arduino joining the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Partner Network as an Independent Software Vendor (ISV) to further democratize embedded hardware for OEMs and Industrial Automation industries.
Arduino Cloud — built on AWS — hit a new milestone of 4 billion data messages per month and is mentioned in Gartner’s Hype Cycle for Infrastructure Platforms.
It has joined the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Partner Network (APN) to deliver enterprise-grade Arduino PRO products that work with AWS for customers in commercial and industrial sectors. The APN is a global community of AWS Partners that leverage programs, expertise and resources to build, market and sell customer offerings.
In addition, the company’s device and data management service, Arduino Cloud, announced that it now processes 4 billion device messages every month from both individuals and businesses. This is a significant milestone from the 3-year-old service built on AWS.
Although companies recognize the immense potential of digital transformation at the edge, many feel the goal is beyond their reach because of a lack of solutions. Arduino Cloud offers both businesses and individuals an easy path to collect data, control the edge and gain insights from connected products without the need to build, deploy and maintain a custom IoT platform.
“Choosing Arduino Cloud for our business application slashed product development time by six months and saved us over $250,000 in engineering services,” said Adam Bishop, co-founder of ABM Vapor Monitoring. “Arduino PRO provides us with an end-to-end commercial platform. Using the Arduino Opta PLC connected to Arduino Cloud, we monitor commercial buildings across America to ensure regulated air quality standards are met. Arduino Cloud has been an instrumental partner in our journey to introduce new products to the market.”
Arduino joins a global network of over 100,000 AWS Partners from more than 150 countries, working with AWS to provide innovative solutions, solve technical challenges, win deals and deliver value to mutual customers. Customers will also experience streamlined support architecting edge-to-cloud integrated solutions, whether choosing Arduino Cloud, AWS cloud services or hybrid architectures.
“Today, industrial hardware and advanced cloud services exist in independent worlds with significant complexity,” said Guneet Bedi, Arduino’s SVP and GM. “By offering integration with the flexibility and scalability of AWS and pay-as-you-go pricing, businesses will be able to greatly reduce complexity and significantly accelerate their go-to-market with the scale of Arduino PRO.”
The open architecture at the core of every Arduino product provides a new preferred path to AWS for all microchips supported by Arduino. In addition, existing Arduino Cloud business customers now have an integration track for scaling to self-managed solutions on AWS, while existing AWS customers now have reference architectures to integrate Arduino products.
Arduino’s Investment to Enable Industrial Innovation
The Arduino PRO product line, introduced in 2020, meets the request from OEMs and industry integrators for a hardware ecosystem that lowers the barrier to entry and accelerates time to market. The Arduino PRO portfolio features 24 industrial-grade products, including the Portenta X8 Linux SOM and UL-certified Opta PLC. Currently, Arduino PRO technology is deployed by more than 2,000 businesses worldwide.
This announcement reinforces the commitment Arduino shared when announcing its Series B funding to chart a new strategic course that emphasized the expansion of its enterprise-scale offerings. More recently, the company named Bedi to head its U.S. operations, with two new offices focused on accelerating its B2B growth.
by Gary Mintchell | Aug 3, 2023 | Edge, Operations Management
Paul Simon wrote that it’s all happening at the zoo. It’s all happening at the edge these days in this market. I just wrote about a new edge orchestration service. This is news from HiveMQ about some more Edge-Optimized technology.
HiveMQ announced the availability of HiveMQ Edge, an open source software gateway with an edge-optimized MQTT broker. HiveMQ Edge helps manufacturing organizations simplify and modernize their Industrial IoT infrastructure by converting proprietary OT protocols like Modbus and OPC-UA into the standardized MQTT format at the edge for easy integration with enterprise and cloud systems.
“We see a clear need for HiveMQ Edge in the market as manufacturers struggle to solve complex edge connectivity challenges on their path to digital transformation,” said Dominik Obermaier, Co-founder and CTO, HiveMQ. “We’re making it faster and easier to connect the edge and reap the full benefits of IIoT with an open gateway that converts proprietary and legacy protocols to MQTT. We added a built-in broker for efficient messaging so users can deploy rapidly, drive costs down, and scale up easily.”
HiveMQ Edge helps companies modernize their IIoT infrastructure with these benefits:
- Seamless data integration to enable a Unified Namespace
- Plug-and-play integrations for protocols like Sparkplug and OPC UA
- An edge-optimized MQTT broker to drive costs down
- Intuitive UI and API-based operability
- Open source with a rich SDK for maximum extensibility
HiveMQ invites developers to download the OSS version of HiveMQ Edge on Github, connect it to devices at the edge, run workloads and provide feedback in the HiveMQ Community Forum.
by Gary Mintchell | Aug 2, 2023 | Data Management, Edge, Operations Management
I’ve not seen much in the way of investment in traditional automation products. The larger companies now all call themselves software companies with investments devoted to acquisitions. Many smaller companies and startups either have a software niche or are working on a variety of edge applications.
A long-time contact from the IT world introduced me to ZEDEDA a few years ago and even asked me to appear on a couple of their webcasts. Its niche is called edge orchestration, and it has some significant investors. This new introduction is called Edge Application Services. This platform includes granular edge application controls and configuration services. The initial component of the platform, Edge Access, provides secure access, control and audit tracing for edge deployments.
Edge computing is required to manage and process that data, but the complexity of distributed environments can make it difficult for customers to get started quickly. Enabling access to core services can provide an on-ramp for organizations to benefit from an initial edge use case while also establishing a foundation for future growth, just as was seen previously with cloud adoption.
“Just as we saw occur with the cloud providers in the early days, it is time for the edge market to evolve beyond just infrastructure and begin to offer value-added services in addition,” said Said Ouissal, founder and CEO of ZEDEDA. “Now, with ZEDEDA Edge Application Services, we are able to offer our customers the ability to manage, configure and control their edge applications simply by leveraging the ZEDEDA ecosystem.”
The first service in the suite, ZEDEDA Edge Access, enables IT administrators and platform operations teams to instantly access any remote device from any location at any time. It is a simple solution that provides secure access, control and audit tracing for edge deployments.
ZEDEDA’s open, distributed, cloud-native edge management and orchestration solution has attracted strategic OEM and customer relationships with Global 500 companies, including Emerson, Rockwell Automation, and VMware. The company continues to quadruple the number of edge nodes it has under management annually, scaling toward a hundred thousand edge nodes and has raised more than $55 million in capital from investors, including Coast Range Capital, Lux Capital, Energize Ventures, Porsche Ventures, Chevron Technology Ventures, Emerson Ventures, Juniper Networks, Rockwell Automation, Samsung Next and EDF North America Ventures.
by Gary Mintchell | Jul 12, 2023 | Data Management, Edge, Internet of Things, Manufacturing IT, Networking, Operations Management, Technology
There was a time when I would take information from OPC Foundation and chat with the MQTT people and then return the favor. It was much like being in the midst of a religious war.
My response was (is) that the market will decide. Individual engineers will choose the solution that best fits their needs at the time. If both technologies have sufficient benefit to enough engineers to form a market, then both will survive. I think there is room in the market for both, since they sort of do the same thing, but actually each provides unique benefits.
I’ve been thinking about this for a while since I’ve had so many other things to digest. The impetus came from a couple of directions—OPC Foundation President Stefan Hoppe’s editorial in the June newsletter and from Stacey Higginbotham’s IoT Newsletter recently that discussed edge.
Hoppe wrote, “Still to this day people only think of OPC UA merely as a secure protocol to move information. It is so much more than that. It is a modeling language in cloud applications and digital twins. It is capable of file transport (since 2009). Most people know that OPC UA started as an initiative in the OT world and expanded from the PLC control plane to SCADA and later to MES and ERP. More and more people are realizing that OPC UA via MQTT is the bridge between OT and IT and is able to push information directly into Microsoft and AWS cloud dashboards without the need for an adapter.”
From Data to Data Sources
Stacey Higginbotham writing in Stacey on IoT Bringing AI to the farthest edge requires new computing.
Stacey writes about IoT generally. Most of her topics are commercial/consumer and chips (her reporting background). She does follow the IoT trail into manufacturing at times. In this newsletter she broaches into something I’ve been expounding for a long time, that is, how edge devices have become smarter with better communications. Then the IT world came up with the term Edge, which is, of course everything manufacturing.
We’re in the midst of a computing shift that’s turning the back-and-forth between cloud and edge computing on its head. This new form of computing has been creeping to the forefront for the last few years, driven by digital transformations and complicated connected devices such as cars.
But the more recent hype around AI is providing the richest examples of this shift. And it will ultimately require new forms of computing in more places, changing both how we think about the edge and the types of computing we do there. In short, the rise of AI everywhere will lead to new forms of computing specialized for different aspects of the edge. I’m calling this concept the complex edge.
As part of this shift in computing, we have to become more nuanced about what we mean when we talk about the edge. I like to think of it as a continuum moving from the most compute and power-constrained devices such as sensors to the most powerful servers that happen to be located on premise in a factory. In the middle are devices such as tablets, smartphones, programmable logic controllers (PLCs), and gateways that might handle incoming data from PLCs or sensors.
Moreover, each of these devices along the continuum might run their own AI models and require their own specialized type of computing to compare the data coming into those models. For example, I’ve written about the need for sensors to get smarter and process more information directly.
Smart sensors turn to analog compute
Cameras or image sensors are popular examples of such devices. This vision sensor from Useful Sensors, which can do person detection on a $10 device, runs a simple algorithm that looks for people and counts them. At a higher level, which requires more processing power, sensors from Sony or chips from CEVA are able to detect specific movements, faces, or other options.
A few weeks ago at the Sensors Converge event, a company called Polyn Technology showed off a version of a chip designed to take raw data and quickly convert it into an insight. To quickly process analog signals from the environment (such as vibrations or sound), the Polyn chip uses analog processing to process the signal and then sends the “insight” to another computer for more processing.
We not only have cameras shooting pictures for QA purposes, but also they are streaming video for applications from industrial engineering to surveillance to predictive maintenance. This is a vast amount of data.
We have tools, but we will need more. Chips with built in communication and analytics are a start.
by Gary Mintchell | May 16, 2023 | Data Management, Edge
There were a couple of process automation news items. Now, let’s switch to the industrial edge and talk data. Litmus announced the availability of digital twins for users of Litmus Edge and Litmus Edge Manager. Now manufacturers have a streamlined way to collect, contextualize, normalize and analyze data with visual representations of purpose-driven digital twin models.
Litmus’ infrastructure supports:
- Asset and site twins
- Use case driven models like energy monitoring, predictive maintenance, production optimization and quality control
- Flexibility to support various digital twin models
- Easy modeling of collected data
- Real-time decision-making and simulation of different scenarios
by Gary Mintchell | May 15, 2023 | Data Management, Edge, Operations Management
Innovation at the Edge continues. I’ve written about ZEDEDA before and have even appeared on a couple of their Web events. The company maintains momentum at this vital confluence of data. This announcement concerns a partnership with Avassa.
- Partnership provides platform teams with a comprehensive security and visibility solution coupled with a developer-friendly container application solution for the distributed edge
- Together, the companies address the growing demand for comprehensive solutions that empower customers to manage the lifecycle of new and existing technologies at the edge
- The combination of ZEDEDA and Avassa solutions enables customers with application-centric visibility and manageability of cloud-native applications while also solving the challenges of the distributed edge
