Does anyone have a recommendation for a MQTT edge device? We looked at the Moxa one and weren’t real thrilled about its capabilities.
Thanks,
Red Lion has some stuff:
We have tested the vanilla MQTT features and it seems to work well. I don’t think we have tried the SparkPlug MQTT flavor.
Redlion is a great start. We’ve had great success with them and they provide many other features besides MQTT.
You should also look at Maple Systems (1/3) the cost of Red Lion.
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@ddurant did you ever use a Red Lion Device for a MQTT edge device?
I’m curious if you did how has it been? Has it worked great?
I’m going to try out the Red Lion CR3000 HMI soon and was intending to use this on everything that needs a MQTT edge device. I was recently told by someone that they had a bad experience with using the Red Lion HMI as the edge device and had to switch to using OPC for that large project for a quick solution instead of replacing hardware.
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Hey Jacob,
I’m sorry to hear your reference didn’t have a good experience.
If it helps, we’ve deployed over 100 Redlion CR3000/DA30’s for a single Ignition project/single broker application and the Redlion devices have been great. They all publish roughly 80-100 process values and setpoints over cellular.
@wbaker That’s good to hear. I’m in the middle of testing with a CR3000 right now. It’s not going great. It’s working but any time there’s a tag name change or sometimes a rebirth message, I get an error in the logs that floods it every 1 seconds.
I have had IA support look at it as well a cirrus link. No solution yet but it looks like the payload from the red lion isn’t consistent. There are several message sent without a timestamp.
Hey Jacob,
Bummer! The one item I know that was important to enable in MQTT Engine was this.
It was needed when we starting adding Redlions into the mix.
Interesting. I’ll certainly give that a try and see what happens.
I’ll update here if it goes well.
Thanks!
That is already enabled on my gateway.
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As I have said before the Maple Systems MQTT Gateway is a very efficient solution to building your own MQTT EDGE DEVICE.
I built my own “EDGE OF NETWORK” device because in the very remote oilfields the conditions are the worst you could even imagine and I needed something that works for our needs.
This is our MQTT EDGE OF NETWORK DEVICE.
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@dcamp1 I looked at the 15" Maple Systems HMI and for that cost, it looks good to me.
The only thing I would need to look into more is if the COM ports can be used a Modbus.
The great thing about the Red Lion CR3000 HMI is that it’s an MQTT Sparkplug device, an HMI and (somewhat) logic controller in one device. Our sensors we use are mostly Modbus and I can read that data into the HMI without any PLC.
We plan on using this in applications where a PLC is not present. For monitoring applications only.
I do undersstand, but please allow me to make this comment. I always include a PLC and this is why.
Once you have a PLC the unit is now a SMART device (meaning it can make decisions to do something without the need to be in communication), also as time goes on an you expand you just add more I/O and tweak the program, I use modbut tcp to communicate with all kinds of devices a lot of different VFD’s.
We run PID LOOPS from the plc to control pumps and motors for all kinds of task. With a PLC you have so many more features available to use.
Update: I have been working with Cirrus Link on figuring out the problem with the Red Lion HMI as an MQTT client.
One thing they have pointed out is that the timestamps from the payload message is sometimes null, in the future or many years ago.
I’m starting a ticket with Red Lion to see what the problem is here.
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The maple systems gateway looks interesting, Just ordered one to play with.
I currently use raspberry pi’s to connect with Siemens plc opc, MQTT to send data to ignition and the node red dashboard to display plc data locally and over vpn.
The maple gateway does all that and more. Will be interesting to see how stable it is.
Thank you for pointing that one out @dcamp1
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