Industrial machinery testing
In order to perform validation testing and fine-tuning of an industrial machinery engineered in Europe, ACTE's partner required a visualization tool to record and analyze a large amount of data.
Monitoring at high data rate per second
The industrial system contains dozens of temperature, pressure, flow, state sensors, I/O status and other internal variables. The need to visualize correct regulation workflow forced us to update data at least every 250ms. The monitoring had to be fast as we reached more than 1200 data points per seconds.
MQTT Protocol
MQTT, a lightweight protocol, became popular in recent years with the rise of IOT systems, but is known for a way longer in Oil&Gas sector as this protocol was originally developed in 1999 to control and monitor oil pipelines.
We connected 4x Allen-Bradley Ethernet/IP PLC modules to a custom script to send hundreds of data points every quarter a second.
Thingsboard software
Thingsboard is an open source IOT platform, it allows quick dashboard development, high messaging rate and data processing. All we needed was built-in on Thingsboard for this project.
Thingsboard is able, with little configuration, to handle more than 5000 requests per second. We still had to tune our workflows and custom scripts to reduce load as we encountered some lagging at first. Afterward, we had a perfect setup to visualize the dataset in real-time.