IOTech Offers Edge Solution for Industrial IoT and Time-Critical OT Systems
July 13, 2022
News
The Edge XRT v2.0 is available from IOTech. This is a significant release of its open software platform, which is intended for time-critical and embedded OT applications at the industrial IoT edge.
The Edge XRT 2.0 greatly simplifies the development of OT applications and enables new edge systems to reach market faster. It is hardware agnostic, meaning it is unconstrained by the silicon provider (Intel or ARM) or the operating system. Users have complete deployment freedom. They can deploy it as a native application, containerized application, or virtualized application.
It is also suitable for microcontroller-based applications where CPU and memory resources are limited due to its small memory footprint and efficient use of computing resources. This makes it ideal for connected commercial or consumer electronic devices (e.g., refrigeration units), medical device applications, or automotive engine management systems.
Third-party application integration is facilitated by the product's open APIs. The product's multi-vendor OT connectivity, cloud interoperability, and high-performance, real-time edge processing capabilities are being used by major industrial OEMs and ISVs to create a new generation of protocol-agnostic edge solutions.
According to IOTech, The new release adds a number of important features including:
- OT connectivity: In addition, the existing pluggable OT connectivity for Modbus, EtherNet/IP and EtherCAT, BACnet and OPC UA protocols, the platform now supports PROFINET, S7, GPS and BLE.
- For protocols that support device discovery such as OPC UA, BACnet and EtherNet/IP, devices can be discovered and then onboarded easily without any manual configuration.
- A new MQTT API allows Edge XRT clients to easily manage the lifecycle of connected device/sensors, support read/write OT data access, control device discovery and resource scheduling.
- When deployed on an Azure Sphere device, an Edge XRT application can now be dynamically configured and reconfigured via a Device Twin running on Azure IoT Hub.
- IOTech has made scalability and performance improvements to address customer demand for concurrent access to an increasing number of OT devices and their data.
Edge XRT is intended for high-performance edge computing applications such as industrial control and real-time signal processing in a wide range of vertical markets. Factory automation, renewable energy, building management, retail, and hospitality are among them. It also allows for the integration of real-time edge applications with higher-level enterprise IT, SCADA, and cloud applications.
Demo Video Provided by IOTech
"As a configurable, embeddable, high-performance OT platform, Edge XRT 2.0 is unique," said Andrew Foster, Product Director at IOTech. "It provides a rich set of OT and IoT capabilities that our customers can easily use to create their own edge solutions. In most cases, this is through simple configuration without the need for lots of custom code."
For more information, visit Edge XRT.
Chad Cox. Production Editor, Embedded Computing Design, has responsibilities that include handling the news cycle, newsletters, social media, and advertising. Chad graduated from the University of Cincinnati with a B.A. in Cultural and Analytical Literature.
