The integration and usage of a IoT Platform to facilitate the I4.0 transistion and digitalization of machines

Julio Fontes Sá
Nov 6 · 5 min read

I. What is Knit-Force and CITEVE?

CITEVE is the technological center for textille and garment industries, located in the North of Portugal, in the city of Famalicão, right in the heart of the Portuguese textile industry. We are a Technological Institute that provides technological support and services to companies operating in the textile & clothing business. Product design & development, prototyping, testing and applied R&D oriented to innovative applications, are included in the service portfolio that also includes consultancy, training and fashion intelligence.

The Knit-Force project for the Textile Industry aims to establish a collective and structured action,oriented to the pre-competitive capacities, which enhance and value R&D results by reinforcing transference and scientific and technological knowledge for this sector. This project has four main strategic areas of focus: Industry 4.0 and Internet of Things (IoT); New Complex Textile Structures; Multifunctionalization; Sustainability and Circular Economy;

Under the I4.0 & IoT pillar, we aim to introduce systematic integration of Industry 4.0 into the Portuguese companies through the development, use and optimization of interoperable technological resources at the service of industry and productivity. The aim of the Knit-Force project in this theme is to find quantitative and qualitative information worldwide, in the textile and clothing sector as well as in other complementary sectors, leading to the adoption of new industrial and commercial technologies capable of promoting productivity and competitiveness. Therefore, we need to experiment, build and try new technology so we can recommend our customers the best route to digitalization.

II. Thingsboard & Knit-Force

Thingsboard (TB) platform was selected for experimentation due to its good reputation, not onlyunder academic reviews but also under the GitHub and global Internet community. This software is available with an open-source license and its website has lessons on how to use each feature, this made easy for the Knit-Force team to install, run and learn how to use this platform.

We selected TB because it has high performance on several areas: Rule processing and design; Device and Users management; Communications and Data security; Visualization and report capability;

-Demonstration of Platform login and navigation

III. Setup & Application

Under our research, we identified the need for a layered architecture of an IoT system: looking at the IoT phenomenon as multi-complex system of sub-systems made us realize that we need not only to identify but also to approach each layer as system of its own complexity and specifications:

Sensors and Actuators Layer: system that gathers, processes and stores data.

Connectivity Layer: system that shares the gathers data, storing it, sending it and receiving it.

Management and Data Layer: system that manages the data — its storage, its usage, its permissions, its availability and its security;

Application Layer: system that allows visualizing the data, combine it and treat it to be exported in new formats.

On our application of technology to demonstrate the I4.0 and IoT vision we decided to utilize TB community edition (CE). With this knowledge, we are now able to prepare and setup a legacy textile-coating machine so that all of its parameters, rules and data are online and under control of its managers.

-IoT architecture of the system.

The main goal of this system is to understand how the several sub-systems function together: From IP Addresses, ports, protocols and PLC communications, to device and users management; data gathering and machine-to-machine communication; data validation and storage; data visualization and extraction.

-Installation and configuration of PLC.

The first step was to prepare the machine in order to extract data from it, was necessary to implement a PLC with an Ethernet port (RJ45 port) and compatibility with the ModBus protocol. The plan is utilizing the Raspberry pi to read the machine data and send it to the server to storage and utilization.

-HMI panel that allows the control of the machine.

Considering the previous identified layers, we designed our system to utilize the following components corresponding to the different layers:

-Monitoring Smart-TV showing ThingsBoard Dashboards — application layer;

-Server running TB CE — management and data layer;

-Network switch connecting Server, RPI and Machine’s PLC via Ethernet cables — connectivity layer;

-Raspberry Pi running Node-RED — sensors and actuators layer.

-Raspberry pi connected to the system.

IV- Expected Functioning:

-Server runs web-service and stores data — Manages users, devices, data rules and dashboards;

-RPI gathers data from PLC addresses, processes it using NODE-RED and sends it to the server (reading it using MODBUS and sending it via HTTP to the server);

-PLC is the brain of the Machine, with all the automation needed to the proper functioning, controlling motors, and coils of temperature, break-sensors and liquid levels.

- Smart-TV displays dashboards with latest values, last day flot graphs and alarms;

V. Learnig & Results

With this implementation of TB CE, we were able to develop and gather knowledge on several key-topics of the I4.0 and IoT paradigm:

- Security (Network, Devices and Users management)

- Connectivity (M2M communication and protocols)

- Machine Control (Programing with traditional [Python and Java] and modern [Rule Engine and RPC requests] frameworks)

Bellow the figures show excerpts of the code used on the RPI, how the Rule Engine was setup, dashboards of control and visualization:

-Node-Red environment showing the nodes responsible for fetching and sending data.
-Main dashboard with indicator cards showing velocities, temperatures, humidity, power consumption and alarms.
-Secondary Dashboard showing historical values of temperature, velocities and humidity.
-Secondary Dashboard showing historical values of power consumption, energy cost and on/off diagram of the state of the machine.

Julio Fontes Sá

Written by

Indusrial Engineer exploring I4.0 and IoT applyed to the textile industry.

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