Description - V2

Description

IoT related communication protocols become more and more important for industrial automation devices. Device makers, machine builders and system integrators must extend their products with OPC UA or MQTT. With the IoT Solution Loadable Firmwares, Hilscher offers a platform for such kind of embedded developments on the field level. IoT protocols can be used in parallel to Real Time Etherent, over the same network cable.

Smooth integration

The different variants of Loadable Firmwares - LFWs - for netX 90 and and netX 90 based products, form a scaleable lineup which provides different levels of functionality. The IoT Solution LFWs belong to the full featured Type 4 variants. They extended the standard protocol LFWs, like PROFINET IO-Device V5, with IoT functionality. In addition to the Real Time Ethernet protocol functions, these firmwares provide an OPC UA server. The additional IoT functionality can be accessed by the application via DPM channel 2 (the 3rd DPM channel). This means, that the new "IoT Solution LFW" shall keep the previously available protocol and Ethernet functions on DPM Channel 0 and channel 1 as is. New "IoT functions" are added via DPM channel 2. This assures an easy and smooth integration into existing products and devices.

The IoT Solution LFWs require external SDRAM and serial flash for netX 90, due to the demanding ressources requirements for IoT protocols.

Host Application access

Access to the OPC UA data is abstracted via the netProxy technology. Users don't have to bother about OPC UA related details, but just access data objects. Read and Write actions to the user data objetcs (IoT data) can be performed from the Host Application by using netPROXY Host API functions (Read / Write Object Element), which are serialized via DPM using acyclic messages. The "IoT functions" via DPM Channel 2 (3rd DPM channel) are provided fully acyclic (no cyclic data mapping is supported) and have lower priority than the Real-time Ethernet communication/cyclic data of DPM Channel 0.

In addition to the OPC UA server, user data objects (IoT data) can be published by the integrated webserver in parallel (same data via webserver and OPc UA sever). The data can be embedded into user defined webpages. Please refer to the Web server API Manual for further information.

The netProxy Host API is based on the cifX API and thus located on a higher abstraction level. It is an implementation of the netProxy mailbox packet API. Users don't have to deal with sending and receiving mailbox packets, but use simple Read/Write object functions. Alternatively, the users may disregard the netProxy Host API and utilze the mailbox packet interface directly. This might make sense in case of limited host ressources and simple object models.

The netProxy Host API component is provided in source code as part of example projects for the IoT Solution LFWs. The component is not a product but an example implementation of the mailbox packet interface. It is provided "as is" without warranty.

Configuration

The OPC UA Server component is configured by the PC based engineering tool Communication Studio with the additonal OPC UA Configurator extension. The tool supports creation and import of OPC UA information models. User data objects can be defined and instantiated. The OPC UA server configuration is exported from the tool as an config.nxd plus an *.tlv file. These two configuration files must be downloaded into the flash memory, PORT_0 directory. The netHOST utility (part of the NXDIAG package) can be used for this purpose.