FYI Wanted to share.

Old Man

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Oct 2022
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I'm using raspberry pi 4b to poll 3 different plcs with modbus tcp and then publish the tag data using mqtt sparkplug b back to my Ignition server.

Works great at about 1/4 the cost of my current Mqtt gateway.
 
I'm using raspberry pi 4b to poll 3 different plcs with modbus tcp and then publish the tag data using mqtt sparkplug b back to my Ignition server.

Works great at about 1/4 the cost of my current Mqtt gateway.

Not quite a industrial solution though....
 
The Plcs are AB Micro820, Siemens Logo, Automation Direct Brx, and I also hook up to the Schneider Altivar 600 & 900 series Vfds. The Node Red lets me poll the tags as offen as I need and the Mqtt Sparkplug B will only publish the tags that "CHANGE" !

Might not be Industrial as you think, but this is the application they are working in.

Outdoors in 2- enclosures subject to hot & cold, the Vfds run 2 40hp (3 phase blowers) that suck Methane Gas from Coal Mine and burned off with 2 (one million BTU/hr) flares. Tags from all 3 plcs and the 2 Vfd get polled every 90 seconds and consolidate down to what we need to get back to our Ignition Server. We then store to SQL Database and run Trends, Pie Charts, and various other reports.

We accumlate "Carbon Credits" that we then sell to companies such as GOOGLE, so they can become "Carbon Netural".
 
Neat !

So you used the ordinary node-red-contrib-modbus-tcp libraries ?

Do you just use cyclic timed triggers as though all the devices were independent, and the libraries take care of queuing and timeouts and errors ?

Are you using an ordinary RPi 4B with a 24V/5V power supply, or one of the more industrialized devices that use the RPi 4B Compute Module and a ruggedized hardware that handles power drops and spikes a little more robustly ?

Sometimes I want to stick a Kunbus Revolution Pi into every control cabinet and use Node-Red to accomplish all the IIOT functions I come up with.
 
Interesting.
But where can you find a Raspberry Pi these days? Some online retailers don't even let you back-order them.
 
Ordered 5 from Amazon a few days back and are ready have them. They are all over the Internet, but you may have to pay anywhere from $75.00 - $175.00 (USD).
 
Yes, I use only standard Node Red "Nodes". I have my flow broke down into several different "Inject" running at different cycle times.

Standard Pi 4B (8gig) Mean Well 120Vac to 5Vdc din rail power, Mounted Pi on a din rail mount also.

I must say Node Red has a lot of featues, that I think the Industrial industry should take a look at.
 
Hi,
I started initially with Node-Red to accomplish some smaller tasks.

I was then "informed" from various sources that Node-Red could be a problem because it may be not so stable to be used in industrial environment.

I think Node-Red is very nice to work with, but after all this feedback I thought it is more for prototyping kind of work.

Do you think your solution is stable? Or do you encounter problems, like need restart node-red or anything like this?

Thank you.
BR Manfred
 
suck Methane Gas from Coal Mine and burned off with 2 (one million BTU/hr) flares.
...

We accumlate "Carbon Credits" that we then sell to companies such as GOOGLE, so they can become "Carbon Netural".


Maybe a bit off topic, but doesnt that just produce carbon in another composition?
Do you use the excess heat for energy?
 
Not quite a industrial solution though....

This is always an option:

https://revolutionpi.com/

This being said, and without knowing his setup, the solution can possibly be replicated with existing hardware. If production servers are virtualized, he could spin a small VM with Linux and move over the node-red "script" and it would work. Failing that, a small PC would do the same.

I think we need to be a little bit more open minded about moving away from "industrial" kit where people's safety are not at risk and shift trends at automation companies.
 
We have used node-red quite a few times. It works great for data collection/publishing.

We have run it on Linux VMs on a Proxmox server a few times, and in Opto22's RIO and in Kunbus RevPis.

We also use the node-red-contrib-modbus-tcp libraries. They have been quite stable for us.

In one application, we used it to pull data over LTE via a VPN from a Schneider M241 in a quick-ditch effort to monitor what the machine was doing. Then you can always throw up a quick Node-red dashboard to trend something for temporary troubleshooting.
 
We have used node-red quite a few times. It works great for data collection/publishing.

We have run it on Linux VMs on a Proxmox server a few times, and in Opto22's RIO and in Kunbus RevPis.

We also use the node-red-contrib-modbus-tcp libraries. They have been quite stable for us.

In one application, we used it to pull data over LTE via a VPN from a Schneider M241 in a quick-ditch effort to monitor what the machine was doing. Then you can always throw up a quick Node-red dashboard to trend something for temporary troubleshooting.

I also use Node-Red via Opto22 hardware to send MQTT SpB payloads to our MQTT broker. Works quite nicely, over a year in production and haven't had any issues with it.
 
I have a groove RIO from OPTO22 monitoring my chilled water system with Node-Red. It manages the sump heaters, issues email alarms and reports status and metrics via MQTT. The status and metrics are read via telegraf and fed into an InfluxDB database while grafana is used to display realtime and trend data accross the business. Other equipment on site can subsribe to the status via MQTT.

MQTT broker, Telegraf, InfluxDB, Grafana, Node-Red (and others) all run under Docker on,,, You guessed it, a raspberry Pi4. Several other non-critical applications also run under Node-Red on the PI. The applications and data are backed up like any other system.

Nick
 

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