The default data ingress path for sensor data into the Factbird Cloud, is through AWS IoT using MQTT.

To enable data transmission directly to the Factbird cloud, two main requirements needs to be met:

• A local OPC server set up to communicate with a public endpoint using MQTT
• Support for TLS 1.2 for authentication and data encryption

The data is split into two major groups, "event" & "input" by the following definition:

• input is regularly sampled time-series data usually counters or process values. Examples of data types that belongs in the input group of data could be:
  • Bottleneck counters of a production line
  • Scrap sensors
  • Temperature measurements
  • Vibration measurements
• event are data that happens at a certain time, and usually as a response to some event happening. In the Factbird Cloud, events are not shown on a graph, but are instead use to tie an action to an event. Examples of event data could be:
  • Batch started / stopped
  • Button pressed
  • Stop registered by the line
  • Stop split

Both types of data comes with some requirements & limitations on their data structure. For example, for both types it is required to provide a timestamp of when the event happened, or the data point was sampled. All timestamps are in UTC time zone with millisecond resolution.

In order to detect when a line is stopped as opposed to running, we require input data to be sent at a fairly regular interval, even if the value of the sensor has not changed since the last transmission. Usually this means that each time series value (input) should be sampled and sent at least every 30 seconds.

MQTT Topics

Input and Event data is to be sent to two different MQTT topics as described here:

• input: <device_type>/input/<uuid>
• event: <device_type>/event/<uuid>

where

• device_type describes the type of device, usually this should be "plc" for custom integrations
• uuid is a unique identifier created by Factbird, that authenticates the communication in combination with an X.509 certificate issued by Factbird. This UUID must also be used as the Client ID in the MQTT client when connecting to AWS IoT.

Quality of Service (QoS)

The Factbird system is designed for a QoS of 1 (The broker/client will deliver the message at least once, with confirmation required). QoS 2 is currently not supported by AWS hence, we do also not support that. If using QoS 0 (The broker/client will deliver the message once, with no confirmation) that might result in data loss and hence strongly disregarded.