Have you ever used siemens Iot2050?
for the moment we use classic telephone sims (iliad_ho_tim_vodafone)
Sorry no I haven't used the Iot2050
I've seen a couple of industrial vendors (especially in the gateway space) supporting docker runtimes on their devices. Some of them have NodeRed as part of their ecosystem:
- Wago (mica)
- Hilscher (NetIOT)
Cheers
J.
I would never want to depend on a Pi in a business environment, especially not in remote places and/or when reliability is important.
I did my experiments with the Pi, the micro SD card always fails after a much too short time. In my case it was a matter of days.
My solution was an Intel NUC, running on Linux. You don't need anything fancy, just a mini PC with an SSD installed.
If you need to process analog or digital inputs and outputs take a look at:
- Mitsubishi Alpha2 micro controller. Very reliable, I have been using them for 20 years with no hardware defects so far. Communication (serial) with a PC is not very easy to set up, but it works. Unfortunately only for up to 15 inputs and 9 outputs.
- Siemens Logo! microcontroller. Works as well if you're familiar with that. In this case you can communicate via Ethernet.
- Adam-series. For instance: Adam-6060 for digital I/O, Adam-6015 for reading temperature sensors, etcetera.
Not always the case, I have 2 Pi's that have been running on the same SD-Cards for several years now with no sign of any issues even when I've had power problems (mains, not the Pi's fault).
A good card with plenty of space seems to be the trick.
Same here, good quality cards last years in my experience. Cheap ones may not. The moral is obvious.
On my Pi2:
pi@pi2 ~
$ sudo tune2fs -l /dev/mmcblk0p2 | grep 'Filesystem created:'
Filesystem created: Thu Sep 24 14:14:51 2015
That is an 32GB Samsung EVO. Currently 73% full - mainly because I keep too much InfluxDB data 
This gives you an indication of how much card activity is happening:
What about using a highly industrial grade control like the Bosch Rexroth ctrlX CORE system?
It is based on Ubuntu Core and also contains a Node-RED snap (loadable module). Via the industrial connectivity options you can connect to nearly every industrial sensor/actor.
There is normally not a problem finding the very best and most expensive equipment. The challenge is to find the right balance between costs, required availability and acceptable down time and the following time & cost to repair. It all depends on customer requirements and other criterias. We know nothing about those so impossible to tell what would be the best choice in this particular case
Hello ,
with my colleague we have come to a partial solution. For a large customer (about 20 installations) we would like to proceed like this.
Reuse the phoenixcontact ILC150 PLC present on site to which we will add the RS485 port. The data will be processed by the PLC (basic control logic and reading of the modbus parameters). The plc will be interfaced with nodered which will run on an industrial pc (I accept advice for something simple) or an intel Nuc. The fundamental thing is the restart in the event of an anomaly in the system (entrusted to the plc) then the data acquisition is secondary (so in the event of a PC block we still have the backup control to see that the system is actually active).
In doing so, the customer is happy because without too much expense we reuse his plc but we improve the service. For the connectivity side we use the RUT955 with which we are finding ourselves very well.
Now I would like some advice on an industrial pc (so as to have more flexibility) or other solutions.
As far as reliability is concerned, the customer has plants 100km from our headquarters, so close enough and every 6 it will be necessary to carry out maintenance on the entire plant and control system.
Can't comment on the choice of hardware I'm afraid. But I would advise that you use Ansible or something similar to build/configure the PC(s) so that you can easily rebuild or build a new one very quickly and easily.
I assume you will use Linux as a base and Debian is generally a good choice for an OS I always think since they prioritise stability over bleeding-edge. As the basis for Ubuntu and many other Linux builds, it is very well supported and stable. You will want to build without a desktop of course.
Then you will need to think about OS and Node-RED updates and how you will manage them. And finally will want to think about monitoring - that is really a subject in its own right.
Oh, and really finally, you will want to have a good think about security. We don't know what kind of business you or your customers are in but if nothing else, they wouldn't appreciate ending up as part of a botnet. If they produce anything of value, they certainly wouldn't appreciate having secrets stolen or industrial processes disrupted because of a insecurely configured computer.
Late response. I have professional experience with this. And to be honest, I think that Node Red is not the best choice in the design. Node Red needs continuously monitoring of when to update and apply updates. I have a feeling that the OT of the customer is run and don't touch it (a lot). The typically OT domain.
Siemens IOT is an awesome solution to connect your OT or a part to the cloud (or their Siemens Cloud). And so is the Revolution Pi with real Profinet IRT support! Combined with Node Red in the cloud, a win-win. But a Raspberry Pi itself is an EMC disaster and has legal issues when things go wrong. The SD Manufactures are stating clear not to us an SD Card as storage for operating systems for example. Don't get me wrong, Pi is an great innovation and game changer in the automation world. It is not an industrial product.
When I go back to the question. You want to upload data from the Field Bus to the cloud. I would keep it more simple. Industry has the OPC UA protocol for sending PLC data to cloud or from OT to IT. OPC UA is designed to send secure data over the cloud and respects the cycle load of a PLC combined with intensie data check. Including quality information and alarm & events. This is something the combination of Modbus/TCP and MQTT don't have. Or you have to program it by yourself.
See if the PLC support this or use an IPC with Matrikon (for example) with the native PLC drivers (for example) to send it to the cloud. These solution requires far less maintenance and are designed for industrial environments. And as I write above, suppport options to the quality of the data from the PLC.
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Actually, don't they use Node-RED in their solution? I'm sure we had a discussion about that a few months ago.
Actually, as long as you keep the combination of node.js, Node-RED and the required nodes stable, you could leave it alone for extended periods. Node-RED itself is very stable when running.
As with any general purpose compute platform though, you DO need to keep the OS updated on a fairly regular basis, especially where security is a concern. As a minimum I'd personally be looking to apply OS updates at least 4 times a year with a capability to apply urgent patches very quickly.
Happ new year Node-Red fans.
On industrial hardware are not a better chips, they test and protect the hardware better.
For example a Siemens PLC 1200 is in a plastic case.
For SD card you can use industrial grade cards with extended temperature range.
Implement a database on SD card with frequently writes is a bad idea.
Ok if your hardware work on south pole or gobi desert you need extended hardware.
Why should an Raspberry PI with Node-Red not work in normal environment for a long time ?
Happy new year to you too.
The chips may be the same, or sometimes even less in strength. It is the total design that makes it ready for an industrial environment. The chip and casing is just a very small part of the design.
Also industrial SD Cards or high end SD Cards have in their release notes written that is not to run an OS on it. This will cause certification issues and can cause potential legal issues.
The MindConnect is a solution to send data to MindSphere. On MindSphere you can run Visual Flow, that is stabilized version of Node Red. MindConnect does not run Node RED.
About updating. That is exactly the difference between IT and OT. In most cases you can't easily update your Windows or software, because there is no time due production. A long, heavy and interesting discussion I want to avoid here. And in the real world too many plants don't even bother to update. "If it run, it runs" is being said too much in OT domains. Therefore I would stick to OPC UA.
That is a badly designed IoT system then since everything both mechanical and electronic MUST have scheduled maintenance time.
Any IoT or IT system that isn't kept up-to-date is a disaster waiting to happen. I should know, I've seen enough of them over the years. In this day-and-age, there is no excuse.
Of course, I recognise that still far too many organisations ignore this basic requirement - you only have to follow the IT news to seem them there every week. Another failure. More data lost or stolen, more systems held to ransom.
If you can't update firmware, software, ids and passwords, that system should not be in use any more than trying to run a badly maintained nuclear power station.
I agree with you for a large part. I am talking about OT and IT. Operation Technology, IT in factories. Just that industry has IIoT and hopefully not IoT. IoT secure in an manufacturing environment.
There are differences in IT and OT.
IT can be state of the art equipment with high frequency scheduled maintanance and acceptable downtimes. While OT can have no downtimes, low frequency maintenance and running on old equipment that can't be changed or is too expensive to replace quicly. I know a plant that runs in total island mode where the reports will be printed out and scanned in office for office work. And vice versa. Just until the whole plant is finally migrated and upgraded.
OT is still slacking severely with security with a history of bad choices where one should be ashamed of and a culture that as long something runs, it is okay. And therefore IEC62433 security standard is created and manufactures are creating more awareness. Stuxnet opened the eyes a bit. A PLC that is 20 years old looks cool, but is not feasible anymore.
The usage here of Modbus/TCP is a great example of an old, unreliable very non-secure protocol that people keep on using. Because "it is only local, and very cheap" 
While OPC UA, Profinet, Ethercat are better solutions.
Good evening, I really like the idea of OPC UA. I have two questions
- For our architecture, assuming to use 1 OPC server plc (siemens 1200 example) for each plant (about 100 variables to be monitored every 30sec approximately) and it is then possible to connect all the plants on a single amazon EC pc to make a DB and interface web?
- The devices installed in the field are all old devices at most modbus tpc or rs485, so I should acquire in modbus and send online with OPC right?
Thank you so much you are giving me a lot of advice!
In my experience, all you have to do is tweak some settings in Linux for the Raspberry Pi not to wear out the microSD card. You have to redirect or disable logging and also disable any write intensive operations. Make sure to format the microSD card to way below it's capacity (this is the only way you can do overprovisioning, having formatted free space available won't work). You can go as far as mounting your partitions read-only from the SD card and having a separate USB flash device for logs or sending logs through the network. In have an arsenal of RPis from 3+ years working 24/7. The only issues that I encountered were power failures of the power supplies and microSD card failures due to wear. The other solution is to use USB connected SSDs which have way better wear leveling on the firmware side. USB boot is production ready and applying a passive heatsink to the SoC would take care of any temperature issues. RPis are in my experience very robust. Take care of them with a quality power supply (even redundant) and mitigate the flash wear and you're good to go.
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