We advise our customers to use the full Kepware documentation here:

iot-gateway-manual.pdf

Architecture

The IoT Gateway feature includes two main components:

• The server plug-in (IoT_Gateway.dll) is responsible for:
  • Configuration of the MQTT, REST client and, REST server agents
  • Data collection from the server runtime
  • Configuration of the Gateway settings
  • License enforcement
• The IoT Gateway system service (server_iotgateway.exe), which:
  • Manages the connections to each third party endpoint
  • Buffers data collected from the plug-in
  • Provides the authentication and encryption layer to each agent

This diagram shows the layout of the IoT Gateway and components. The plug-in and gateway install on the same machine with KEPServerEX. KEPServerEX uses drivers to connect to data sources. That data is collected in the plug-in and sent to the gateway. The gateway publishes that data to the configured endpoint(s). In this diagram, data flows from the device / data sources at the bottom up to the endpoints at the top.

Factbird is attached as the MQTT Broker in this overview.

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 used 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

Setup

Assuming that the Kepware server has been set up with connections to the PLCs and an IoT Gateway, this covers the steps after that.

Setting up Kepware to shoot MQTT messages to Factbird involves several steps:

• Adding the AWS Root certificate to Windows server
• Adding the MQTT client certificate to Kepware
• Configure Kepware IoT Gateway Agent with Client Name and Topic URL
• Setting up a Tag in the IoT Gateway Agent
• Change the IoT Gateway Agent with a High Publish Rate