I just wanted to pass this information on, as I think this is a great example of how we might use the “Raspberry Pi” in the Industrial Automation Industry!
I’m in the Oil & Gas Industrial and we use all kinds of vendors to help us get the job done, the problem is sometimes it’s hard to move “Digital Data” across the different platforms/protocols/vendors.
I’m sure everyone understands this, so let me explain how we were able to complete this project with these tools, “Node-Red, Raspberry Pi, REST-API”.
With this project we chose to have SPOC (well known in the Oil & Gas Industry) to supply the MCC and SCADA (VTSCADA) for all the DATA Reporting. SPOC stores this DATA in a SQL database and their programmers allowed us to access this data with REST-Api calls. But, in my opinion, with a severe limitation, I had to use a single API call for every parameter value that we wanted.
So with Node-Red, Raspberry Pi, this is now what works for us.
In my flow I set up a delay between each call (did not want to cause any problem on SPOC’s server), then took the response from each call and created a JSON object. Then merged all of the single objects into a object ARRAY, from here it was easy to publish using MQTT Sparkplug B, the data into our Ignition server.
Now we create our own Trends, Reports, Totals, Graphs, Etc.. and once I published this with Ignition everybody in our administration can keep tabs on this project that is 200 miles away from the office.
This Raspberry Pi runs in a rack from my office which is climate controlled.
Here is what my Node-Red looks like.
