Guest contributor, Pat Millot, Balluff

From my smartphone, I can do anything from making coffee to adjusting my home thermostat. This wave of appliances and other physical devices connecting and communicating through a network is known as the Internet of Things and it’s playing a crucial role in industry. With the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) we can now monitor PLC data without ever intruding on the PLC. Let’s take a look at how I implemented PLC tags on a web application.

 The first step is to download OPC UA historian software. OPC UA stands for Open Platform Communications Unified Architecture. OPC is a client/server communication standard that was made as a gateway between the PLC and a Windows PC. The UA was added as an upgrade that allowed communication across other operating systems such as Linux and iOS along with other added functionality improvements. Once this software is running and the PLC and PC are communicating, we can work on hosting that data.

Hosting the controller data can seem like a daunting task at first due to the many different options in software and programming languages to use. For example: Ruby, PHP, ASP, ASP.NET and much more are available for back-end development. For my web app, I used SQL to host the data from the OPC UA software. As for the back-end, I went with node.js because it has great packages for working with SQL; in addition to the fact that node.js uses JavaScript syntax which I’m familiar with. The front end of the app was written with HTML and CSS with JavaScript for interactivity. With all these elements in place, I was ready to host the server on the PC to host PLC data.

With smart IO-Link sensors on our conveyor I was able to look at diagnostic and functional data in the PLC and setup an interactive screen at the conveyor for viewing production and maintenance information.

And now I can even check my sensor outputs with the same smartphone that just made my coffee and adjusted my office’s temperature.

You can learn more about the Industrial Internet of Things at www.balluff.us.

Shop Balluff products online at www.cmafh.com