April-26th-2018, 09:36 AM
Currently I'm working with the Hilscher's netPI (NOIT-E-NPI3-51-EN-RE) to implement a cloud application. Basically, the project it's subdivided in two tasks. The first task is to send data from a OPC UA Server to the netPI. The second task is to send data from netPI to the cloud, in which we are going to develop an app. My questions are the following regarding the netPI device
1.- For retrieving the data from the OPC UA server to netPI, I read that we can use NODE-RED. For using this tool, I wanted to know how to configure the basic flow communication. I mean, there is a bunch of functions based on Java Script that we should program. But is there a guideline to do that? Is there other alternative to set up this communication (i.e. PROFINET).
2.- For communicating netPI to the Cloud I'm considering Microsoft Azure and Web Amazon Services. Which do you recommend based on your previous experience. My purpose is purely academic.
3.- Finally, regarding to my project scope, do you think is really necesary to create a Docker Image from the scratch ? Or maybe is it possible to adapt one of the images on Docker Hub to my requirements?
April-26th-2018, 10:21 AM
Hello Stefano,
to your questions:
1.) To gather data from an existing OPC UA server (your server somewhere located on an IPC or PC) you need to have an OPC UA client running on netPI. You said you prefer to do that with Node-RED, correct? Then you need to install an OPC-UA Client into Node-RED. There is a node available you can install into Node-RED here
https://flows.nodered.org/node/node-red-contrib-opcua. But you can also decide to use python also cause there is also a free OPC UA client available for python here
https://github.com/FreeOpcUa/python-opcua. We cannot tell you which you want to prefer. It is up to you
2.) I have not collected any experience yet with Amazon Web Services. The only experience I collected was using the MS Auzre SDK from here:
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/downloads/. A MZ Aure account you get for free 30 days within 5 minutes of work. So you can test it. I have made an example container at
https://hub.docker.com/r/hilschernetpi/n...-showcase/ using the SDK to push some data to our MS Azure Account for a demo. But with the source code link of the container you can see how to install it into your netPI container.
3.)Well I would recommend to start with our example container
https://hub.docker.com/r/hilschernetpi/n...-fieldbus/. It installs you can node-red and a fieldbus node extra to communication to our industrial network controller. But since node-red includes and installer for other nodes also, you can post install the OPC UA client and also the MS Azure Node-RED node
https://flows.nodered.org/node/node-red-...re-iot-hub. But if I were you I would do my own container.
„You never fail until you stop trying.“, Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955)