Big data and the IoT do not require deep pockets – are you ready?

The fourth industrial revolution is happening, there really is no escaping it; and this time it is being driven by data. We are seeing it in some of its guises in consumer applications, where connected refrigerators can reorder our milk or our digital assistants and mobile phones can turn on our heating – all thanks to the connectivity enabled by the Internet of Things.

It is also making significant headway in industry, from the smallest single-machine applications all the way through to massive industrial complexes, with thousands of I/O nodes. In both cases the primary protagonists are the ones and zeros that make up these digital signals.

But it’s not just the data, it’s the data pathways that these ones and zeros exploit and then it’s the software that collects, collates, deciphers and presents them in order to complete and present the bigger picture. Finally, it’s the humans at the end of the chain, who make the decisions based on what their software is telling them.

This huge interconnected network is called many things. To the consumer it is the Internet of Things, but to engineers and industry professionals this is a catchy name given to the iterative forward step from the communications systems that have existed for a few decades, but can now piggy back on the World Wide Web – taking and delivering these operational ones and zeros globally, or at the very least further away from the machines.

The great news is that you don’t have to be a big company making big machines for big customers to collect and exploit this big data. You don’t even have to leverage the big data yourself; you just have to have the means in place, or the capabilities on your machines, so your customers can. Connectivity to these bigger networks, whether in-house or external, is the key; and the ideal situation would involve some form of Ethernet-based protocol and connection (wireless or hardwired) as the link point.

Even if your machines use lower-level control networks, all is not lost. There are plenty of ways to make them IoT enabled; and many of these approaches are certainly not out of reach from a budgeting perspective. The first and most obvious approach is to exploit an Ethernet-capable PLC, which can not only act as an incredibly capable machine controller, but also offers all the necessary Ethernet communications capabilities.

RS has a number of devices and bundles/starter kits that will allow users to connect existing legacy systems to wider networks, including controllers from well-known brands such as Siemens and Schneider Electric. Other types of intermediary devices can also be deployed to bring legacy systems into an Ethernet environment, such as the ED-204 Ethernet Media Converter from Brainboxes, which can link PLCs with PC-based data acquisition and analysis solutions. From a purely software-based approach, solutions are also available that give operators a web-based interface system that connects to all manner of shop floor devices.

And it’s not just restricted to higher-level controllers or intermediary devices; many traditionally ‘dumb’ line-side products, such as sensors and meters, are being supplied with Ethernet capabilities; and for remote or hard-to-reach applications these often use wireless protocols. Carrying on with the wireless theme, RFID is also being widely exploited for track-and-trace and monitoring, with the IoT connection finally being provided by the readers that scan the RFID devices.

Although the benefits of IoT connectivity might not be immediately apparent, especially when you look at the data being generated by a single machine, what you have to do is look at the bigger picture. Imagine that your machine or device in amongst a sea of others, all generating bespoke data sets and being used by a company that lives or dies on the basis of process improvements and throughput gains. In this context, the amount of information being generated and collected may be huge, but it is all useful; and with the correct software and analysis, a single second shaved off a single production cycle from a single machine could propagate into minutes or hours’ worth of savings over the course of a working shift, day or week.

In the industrial world, proprietary mid- to high-level networks are reaching the end of their usefulness as more and more global end users move to open, scalable, common-software platforms. And you can guarantee that Ethernet capabilities are in the mix somewhere. With wireless and hard wired off-the-shelf Ethernet technology hitting lower price points, there is now no excuse to not deliver this type of connectivity by any of the means discussed above. Even if your machine or product is a very small fish in a very big pond, its capability to communicate with the wider enterprise is still essential. Maybe not now or tomorrow, but with the way things are heading the near future is going to be even more connected than it is now, so there is no better time to start exploiting the IoT – for your customers’ sakes.

Find out more here