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MQTT is coming on strong

The co-founder of Cirrus Link Solutions, Arlen Nipper has worked in the embedded computing space for going on 38 years.

The co-founder of Cirrus Link Solutions, Arlen Nipper has worked in the embedded computing space for going on 38 years. Through most of that time his focus has been on infrastructure solutions and embedded computers that do communications protocol conversion. He focuses on technologies such as MQTT protocol that let businesses put data to work faster and smarter, thus helping those businesses make decisions that are better informed because they’re based on real-time access to critical information. We talked with him recently about MQTT’s potential role in the subset of manufacturing called “packaging.” MQTT, by the way, is the acronym for Message Queue Telemetry Transport, a proven machine-to-machine data transfer protocol that is quickly becoming the leading messaging protocol for the Industrial Internet of Things. Among the specialties that Cirrus Link offers are MQTT Modules that can be added to the Ignition platform from Inductive Automation, which empowers companies to set up their own IIoT solution on a secure MQTT Message-Oriented Middleware (MOM) infrastructure.

What kind of issues are you seeing out there?
For 35 or 40 years now, we've been taking intelligent devices, and the very first thing that we do is we put a protocol on them, and then we connect them to an application. Then we’re stuck.
Innovation stops. So we run like that for four or five years, then we tend to rip it all out and put it all back in again, making this same mistake: "I'm going to connect this device to this application, and I'm going to connect this other device to this other application." The problem with such an approach is that if you want anything else from that device then you're going to have to go through the application. You're either going to have to rewrite the application or you're going to have to modify something that's off the shelf to where you end up with a one-off system implementation that nobody can support anymore. I’ve been in so many system implementations where someone points to a box sitting in the corner somewhere and they say “Arlen, we don’t know what that thing does, but we can’t take it out because if we do then this thing over here will quit working.”

Can you describe a food or beverage application that has caught your attention recently?
I’ve been working with a manufacturer in the dairy industry who has been very aggressive in making data readily available to executives throughout the organization by way of Ignition dashboards. But they’re having to stitch it together by programming the Ignition OPC-UA software to poll for all that additional information. There’s nothing wrong with that, it’s working fine. But they’re going to reach a point where they can’t poll fast enough for all of the information that they want. Wouldn’t it be better if their packaging machines, for example, could just publish all of the information and then they could have multiple instances of Ignition subscribing to subsets and super-sets of the information that they need?

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