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The Embedded World trade fair, held in Nuremberg, Germany has become the world’s largest show for the embedded community. While the embedded market is fragmented into thousands of different application areas, the focus on automation has grown in recent years, as the IIoT is picking up pace and automation suppliers put more and more intelligence into their field and edge devices.
Open Source in Industry
For the developer community, especially in the embedded world, the open source idea has long been a golden rule. Increasingly, this approach is now entering the traditionally conservative automation industry and was discussed in depth at the fair.
The Standardization Group for Embedded Technologies (SgeT) introduced a software-related IoT standard for embedded systems, the so-called Universal IoT Connector (UIC). The integration of counterparts should be made easier by the three levels of abstraction, allowing partitioning of the many aspects of IoT computing. The UIC is a software-only standard that should enable any embedded hardware supporting the eAPI specification to exchange data between embedded devices and a cloud hosted infrastructure.
The cross-platform and open approach streamlines access to multiple hardware components from multiple vendors through a broad set of protocols (MQTT, XRCE, OPC / UA, etc.) and through a growing number of supported cloud platforms such as AWS, M2MGO's People System Things (PST), SAP Hana or Microsoft Azure Cloud. In addition, UIC runs under both Windows Embedded and Embedded Linux.
The solution is based on two main pillars: the Cloud Mapper for hardware identification, security and device mapping and the Cloud Agent for communication handling and decoupling. The UIC interface standard makes a distinction between the device configuration (hardware identification, device mapping, value-to-information matching), the sensor and actuator communication (hardware driver) and the device communication (data transfer & processing). With more than 450 cloud service offerings and an even greater number of possible hardware configurations, this standard may provide a very open, efficient, and hands-on approach to current and future Internet of Things solutions.
My colleague Frank Thomas recently wrote about some other highlights at the embedded world. For more information, please have a closer look at our webpage or get in contact with your ARC client manager.