The interconnectivity between systems and machines has increasingly advanced in various industry sectors. You, who are reading this article now, must have already seen or even applied some solutions to improve data collection and integration between systems in your company.
Sometimes, simply implementing new routines is enough to make different processes talk to each other. However, most control and data acquisition equipment in operation in industry does not have the necessary technology to perform these tasks. Created to meet the demands of Industry 4.0 , the Compact PLCs from the Nexto Xpress solution have advanced communication features capable of connecting different machines and processes to the IoT universe.
Developed by the R&D team Altus, the solution supports a wide variety of communication protocols, which allows it to interact with different types of industry devices. Among these protocols, three stand out for their ability to communicate with multiple devices and IoT systems: OPC UA, MQTT and CANOpen.
See below how these protocols differ and why they are widely used in applications for data collection and process integration in the Industry 4.0 environment.
OPC UA
Created in 2008 through an initiative involving different companies in the technology segment, including Microsoft, the standard was created to guarantee the interconnection of smart devices on the factory floor, improving the exchange flow information and increasing the agility of scenario analysis.
As its name suggests, OPC UA is an open communications platform (Open Platform Communications), which means that it operates under any operating system and on any hardware platform, such as PC, servers on cloud and PLC. The protocol is compatible with firewalls and provides a set of controls, such as session encryption, authentication, user control, among others. The standard also has a multi-layer architecture with a structure prepared to incorporate future technological innovations.
In an industrial context, the protocol can be used to make the connection between the PLC and the supervisory system, such as SCADA/HMI BluePlant, which, by the way, has just received a new update. In this context, the PLC would be responsible for providing the necessary information to base the decision-making of plant operators and for receiving adjustment instructions for field devices.
See more about OPC UA and its differentiators for connectivity in the Industry.
MQTT
Developed by IBM in the late 1990s based on TCP/IP, MQTT (Message Queue Telemetry Transport), as its name suggests, is a messaging protocol supporting asynchronous communication between parties, that is, it decouples the sender and receiver of the message both in space and time. The standard has a broker-based structure, which allows an MQTT client to subscribe to and publish on topics, while these topics are managed by the broker and passed on to clients. That is, when a client publishes a message on a given topic, the broker forwards these messages to all clients subscribed to it.
Unlike other HTTP-based protocols, which present important speed, reliability and performance problems in IoT environments, MQTT is highly reliable and operates with great ease, which makes it one of the most used standards for communication with the cloud and web applications.
Access an article where we detail the MQTT protocol in more detail.
CANOpen
Created in 1994 by a group of companies, CANOpen is one of the most complete and diversified industrial networks on the market today. By operating on a multi-master communication standard, the network serves markets with high complexity and data security requirements. This multi-master model also gives communication between application devices agility and simplifies network work.
As it is a low-cost international standard, present in several pieces of equipment on the market, CANOpen can be used to perform communication between the Xpress and the most varied intelligent field devices , such as frequency inverters, magnetic sensors, positioners, motors, among others. In this way, the PLC can receive instructions from the supervision system through the OPC UA protocol and transmit them to field devices through CANOpen.
Discover some of the features for CAN interface in Nexto Xpress PLCs.
Find out more about Nexto Xpress PLCs
Altus' first line of programmable controllers prepared to meet the demands of Industry 4.0, the Nexto Xpress solution has four model options that differ in number of points and features: XP300, XP315, XP325 and XP340. They all have 16 digital inputs, 16 transistor digital outputs, an Ethernet port, another RS-485 standard serial and a CAN type port, however, the XP315 PLC also has 2 two- and three-wire RTD analog inputs and 5 analog inputs for voltage and current. The XP325 model has all these features plus 4 analog outputs, the same features present in the XP340 model, which also has WebServer support.
Like the other members of the Nexto family, the PLC Xpress also uses the CODESYS technology platform with configuration via MasterTool IEC XE, FREE programming software for the series with scalability for micro to large-scale projects.
Check out more details about the Nexto Xpress solution products.
