Extending Legacy Industrial Machines by a Low-Cost Easy-to-Use IoT Module for Data Acquisition

Abstract

Industry 4.0 is a paradigm that enhances industrial automation systems with the recent advances in the domain of the Internet of Things (IoT), gaining new possibilities and providing new services. Traditional industrial machines do not have IoT capabilities, and in order to integrate such a machine into Industry 4.0, there is a need for an intermediary device or system that communicates with the machine through its supported communication interfaces and protocols and forwards the communication to the global network. This paper presents the development and experimental validation of a low-cost hardware module that can easily integrate the machine’s existing control unit into the IoT and enable synchronization of the measurements and states of the variables of the machine and its environment with a cloud server. The developed module is universal, can connect to any control unit that is able to communicate through basic RS232 serial communication, and does not require the control unit to have any higher level communication protocol implemented. On the other end, the presented solution uses a dedicated smartphone application to provide remote monitoring and control of the machine through the cloud by using the synchronized variable states, as well as further possibilities for storing, processing, and analyzing the historical data from the system. The developed solution was experimentally validated on an experimental setup consisting of a conveyor belt driven by a three-phase asynchronous electromotor controlled by a programmable logic controller through a variable-frequency drive.

Retrofitting-Based Development of Brownfield Industry 4.0 and Industry 5.0 Solutions

“…Industrial big data management tools are used for comprehensive platforms due to their abundant add-on packages, such as Apache Kafka [59]. Free service such as Blynk [104] is also an option for a low-cost solution. Commercial cloud platforms are deployed from Microsoft, Amazon, Siemens, Google, and SAP.…”

“…In general, the availability of data is the foundation for the higher application toward smart manufacturing [74], which is discussed in the next section separately. It is worth mentioning that once the legacy system is retrofitted with the data visualization [127] and equipped with web service [18], or mobile HMI [64], [104]. The operators will be the ones who benefit the most in their work.…”

“…Plastic injection [114], Electronic manufacturing [76], Iron & Steel production [84], Limestone processing [90], Industrial equipment [86], Steel Mill [20], Car assembly [75], Oilfield [81], CNC machining [115], [127], [128], Metal cutting [93], Industrial robot [82], Material handling [104], Assembly line [77],…”

An overview of IoT based intelligent irrigation systems for greenhouse: Recent trends and challenges

“…Monitoring in an intelligent irrigation system involves collecting data representing the latest microclimate data and water and soil conditions around the irrigation area through a microcontroller connected to the IoT [51], shown in Figure 4. The development of real-time monitoring devices was made possible due to the rapid development of microcontrollers and sensors, low-cost hardware (Arduino UNO, ESP8266, Raspberry Pi), and fast internet, which enhanced the performance of monitoring and control systems [17,52]. There are two types of internet connections: wired and wireless; Wired connections make the internet connection stable, but with fixed hardware location.…”

Razvoj I Konfigurisanje 3d Štampača

“…Korišćene su linearne okrugle vođice i trapezna navojna vretena. Za upravljanje moguće je koristiti različite upravljačke elemente [2][3][4] Osnovnu konstrukciju radne platforme predstavljaju aluminijumski profili koji su povezani plastičnim delovima. Unutar delova za povezivanje smešteni su kuglični ležajevi oznake LM12UU kako bi se omogućilo kretanje po vertikalno postavljenim vođicama.…”