I’ve been thinking a lot about my smart gas range, which is magically ready to receive directions from me, via my cell phone, no matter where I am. With the tap of my finger I can check that we didn’t walk out and leave a burner on or I can preheat the oven. My range’s presence on the Internet of Things (IoT) allows me to monitor and control it from anywhere.

Smarter people than me realized that by internet-abling machines and sensors and controllers on factory floors or in far-flung installations, you could monitor and control and collect data without having to have a person standing right next to the device. Voila: the Industrial Internet of Things and Freedom!

So this week we focused on the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and some of the myriad products we carry to support it. 

We kicked off the week with the Tibbo Technology WM2000. The WM2000 is a programmable wireless IIoT module. It is designed to simplify and speed up IIoT development by providing the easiest-to-use solution available for sensor to cloud connectivity. Automatic Association and Automatic Debugging and upgrades via WiFi mean that you only need power to make it work!

The Raspberry Pi based BH3 IIoT Gateway from BiZright Technology is a general-purpose industrial gateway box with the advantages of community driven open source software. Features such as a durable enclosure that improves thermals and adds chassis ground, industrial power supply, watchdog timer, UPS, and durable power switch make it perfect for high noise and vibration environments!

It’s easy to embed cellular communication and edge computing capabilities with MultiTech’s Dragonfly Nano SoM. This tiny cellular modem with integrated Cortex-M4 processor and multiple I/O interfaces lets you turn any device into an IoT device! It is fully certified and MNO approved. Programmable using Arm® Mbed™.

By the end of the week we were thinking about all the data that all those IIoT devices were generating. IIoT networks with 1000’s of connected devices generate vast amounts of data to collect and process. It can be expensive and inefficient to transfer all that data to the cloud for processing. INSYS icom’s intelligent industrial routers support hardened software containers where your code can run independently of router functions, allowing you to pre-process your data at the Edge.

Why not go all out and create a control center for monitoring all the data from all the machines, and controllers, sensors, PLCs, and PCs in your industrial network? The INSYS icom router translates machine protocols into IT protocol allowing Paessler's PRTG software to take all that data and provide a comprehensive and reliable monitoring view of the entire production environment.

Perhaps in a future blog, our Chief Tech Geek will take a crack at explaining SCADA ~ it’s definitely beyond me!