Handling Advantech Wise 710 OPC-UA telemetry using OPCPublisher

Microsoft has an extensive IoT platform based on Azure.

It provides so many features, this can be overwhelming for customers. Therefore, Microsoft provides Azure IoT solution accelerators, based on the Azure IoT reference architecture.

Some of the original accelerators (it started with Azure IoT suites) like Remote Monitoring are now outdated or even archived. These are replaced by excellent Azure IoT Central apps which demonstrate the capabilities of the IoT platform for numerous markets and verticals:

There is still one original accelerator alive-and-kicking: the Connected Factory. This one demonstrates the use of OPC-UA protocols on the edge and in the cloud.

More than two years ago, I already wrote about this accelerator and the OPC publisher module, the backbone of this accelerator. Since then, a lot has changed. Some functionality is (temporarily) deprecated so I got a lot of questions based on the old blogs.

So it’s time to update it a little and see how the OPC Publisher is doing these days.

The OPC-UA solution is open source and covers a lot:

I limit this blog to the scope of my very first blog, extracting OPC-UA messages and send them to the cloud using a ‘published nodes’ file.

We just need an OPC-UA server to get some sample data from. For this, I used an Advantech Wise 710 as an industrial protocol gateway.

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Using OPC-Twin for OPC-UA discovery and sending back commands

In the past, I have written multiple blogs about implementing OPC-UA on IoT Edge.

Until now I have written about collecting OPC-UA values and sending them to the cloud using the OPC Publisher.

But this OPC Publisher is actually just a small part of what Microsoft is actually offering regarding OPC-UA.

Microsoft has a team in both Redmond (USA) and Munich (Germany) working on Industrial IoT. Everything they produce is open source. You can find thier work on github.

With the OPC Twin, they also make it possible to discover, register and manage your Industrial Assets with Azure IoT and most of it can be done zero-touch.

Look at this diagram covering OPC-AU on Azure:

To the left, we see a OPC-UA server and an IoT Edge gateway. It is ‘living’ on the factory network. In the middle we see the Azure IoT Hub acting as cloud gateway and to the right, we see the OPC-UA backend which is provided by the IIoT team.

Of course, all of this is open source. And out of the box, a lot is already working.

OPC-UA, the full round trip

In this blog, I want to show how we can discover OPC-UA servers, update the OPC Publisher to read new nodes (exposed by the discovered servers) and I want to send commands back to the OPC-UA servers.

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Getting started with OPC-UA on Azure IoT Edge

OPC-UA brings the promise of secure and platform independent M2M communication:

“The OPC Unified Architecture (UA), released in 2008, is a platform-independent service-oriented architecture that integrates all the functionality of the individual OPC Classic specifications into one extensible framework.”

Microsoft invests heavily in OPC-UA by providing several solutions, eg.:

And most of it is open-source!

But it’s hard to get started, what do you need to get data from an OPC-UA Server into the cloud using IoT Edge?

Here is a quick start by using the UPC UA Publisher module.

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