oBox Suite
The new product oBox Suite offered by One-Way Automation includes oBox Industrial PC and a suite of multiple applications to collect data from industrial data sources such as PLCs, harmonize and transform this data, and then forward it to various databases or MQTT brokers.
The main applications distributed by One-Way Automation are:
- DeviceGateway makes data from different industrial sources accessible over the OPC UA Server interface. If your data source already provides data via the OPC UA interface, you can skip using of this application.
- OPC UA Forge. Use it if you need to model your namespace, harmonize and normalize data, and publish data to MQTT brokers using OPC UA Pub/Sub payload format. As well as it provides access to the data over REST API and can act as a Historian.
- ogamma Visual Logger for OPC - this application is used to move data from OPC UA servers to various databases, such as SQL servers, InfluxdB, Apache Kafka, or MQTT brokers.
Depending on your use case, you can use each of them separately, or together in any combination.
Additionally, you can run in the oBox Industrial PC third-party applications too, such as open-source products Grafana, InfluxDB, TimescaleDB, or commercial products like Ignition.
A high-level context diagram is shown below:
The integrated setup shown above includes the following components:
- To run any application, an industrial-grade computer is required. For that, we offer oBox IIoT Gateway, an industrial PC intended to run IIoT Edge applications like OPC UA Forge.
- If our data is not available over OPC UA interface, then we offer to use DeviceGateway from our other technology partner Takebishi. With DeviceGateway you can connect to almost 300 industrial data sources such as PLC, RTU, CNC, etc.
- With OPC UA Forge, all data from various sources is aggregated into Unified Namespace. From here your data can flow in different directions.
- Using our ogamma Visual Logger for OPC, it takes only minutes to connect to any OPC UA Server, including OPC UA Forge, discover address space, map OPC UA metadata to the format understandable by the destination (for example MQTT topics), and start forwarding data to one of the following destinations:
- SQL database. Can be SQLite, MS SQL, TimescaleDB, PostgreSQL, or MySQL.
- InfluxDB. All versions are supported
- Confluent / Apache Kafka
- MQTT Broker. With MQTT, data can be published to all major cloud platforms: Microsoft Azure IoT Hub, AWS IoT Broker, Google Cloud Platform, and IBM Watson IoT Platform.
With OPC UA Forge, aggregated data from Unified Namespace can be accessed by any OPC UA client: SCADA, MES to name a few.
- With an additional History Module, OPC UA Forge can store real-time data in the popular time-series database InfluxDB, and then present that data over OPC UA History Access interface.
- Over OpenAPI-compliant REST endpoint can be accessed by third-party applications like ERP systems.
Further below you can find some use cases which can help you to decide what modules you need to purchase:
Use Case 1.
I need hardware to run my IIoT Edge Application.
If you already have applications and now looking for hardware to run them, we offer our oBox line-up of industrial PCs.
Note that it has multiple models, having different capabilities, such as computing power, storage, and connectivity options (serial ports, Ethernet, Wi-Fi, cellular 4G and 5G).
Use Case 2.
I need to move data from OPC UA Servers to the cloud platform.
This can be done with our product ogamma Visual Logger for OPC.
You can run it on your hardware, or we can ship it pre-installed on our oBox Industrial PC.
Use Case 3.
I need to move data from a device that has no OPC UA Server to the cloud platform.
Add into the suite DeviceGateway from our technology partner Takebishi. It can connect to more than 320 series of devices from 80 vendors, and make this data accessible over OPC UA Server interface. From there you can move it to the destination with our ogamma Visual Lgger for OPC.
Use Case 4.
I have my data available via OPC UA, and I need to normalize and harmonize it, and model and organize it in a Unified Namespace.
For this case, we offer OPC UA Forge from our partner ProsysOPC.
Use Case 5.
I need to collect data from a mix of modern and brown-field devices, normalize/harmonize/re-model, organize it in a Unified Namespace, and move data to the cloud platform.
For this case, we offer a solution that includes all of the components.