Tag: Industry 4.0

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Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) brings savings and efficiency

The main difference between well known Industry of Things (IoT) and Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is the place of application and approach to the role of user. IIoT focuses on increasing the profit, efficiency and safety of data used in any industrial application. Company’s main investment into IIoT is made to ultimately lower the global cost of bussiness activity and avoid any unnecessary maintenance costs.

The basic Internet of Things (IoT) objectives include management of facilities for User’s greater convenience and time saving. Smart homes, health monitoring and almost every aspect of human life is = covered more and more by IoT accessories and applications, but they mainly focus on end-user experience. The Industrial IoT looks far beyond that and brings profits and savings to manufacturing and maintenance level.

Companies can also benefit greatly by seeing it as a tool for finding growth in unexpected opportunities. In the future, successful companies will use the Industrial Internet of Things to capture new growth through three approaches: boost revenues by increasing production and creating new hybrid business models, exploit intelligent technologies to fuel innovation and transform their workforce.
© Accenture

The benefits of using  IIoT devices and complex solutions improve bussines efficiency (e.g., improved uptime of systems and remote monitoring of parameters) through easy maintenance and cloud management.

The new means of control are called Ecosystems, entwining the whole structure of industrial installation and software platforms to unleash unimaginable powers of existing industries. Coexistance of human controlled, cloud management utilities and devices, result in unprecedented levels of productivity.

The IIoT is defined by Accenture as “a universe of intelligent industrial products, processes and services that communicate with each other and with people over a global network”. This connected web is becoming increasingly ubiquitous across a wide range of industries, from oil and gas, utilities and transportation through to the medical field.

While these devices can be very beneficial for organisations and consumers every day, even greater value may be derived by using analytics to generate insights from the vast datasets generated by IIoT.

Research by Accenture and General Electric found that industrial organisations see a considerable upside in IIoT as a complement to big data analytics. More conservative forecasts in this research estimate that this activity could be worth $500bn by 2020.
© ComputerWeekly

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ModBerry 500 M3 with Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3 out now!

We are proud to announce that our newest device ModBerry 500 M3 is now available to order. ModBerry 500 M3 is an upgraded ModBerry 500 industrial computer series, using latest Compute Module 3 from Raspberry Pi. Used module increase the device’s performance up to ten times, maintaining low power consuption and optimal price of this solution. ModBerry features industrial protocol support, e.g. Modbus, M-Bus, SNMP, MQTT and more. Read full specification in ModBerry 500 M3 datasheet below:

Download ModBerry 500 M3 Datasheet

Main features of ModBerry 500 M3:

  • Quad core Cortex A53 processor @ 1.2 GHz with Videocore IV GPU
  • 1GB LPDDR2 RAM
  • 4GB eMMC Flash
  • Full Modbus/M-Bus/SNMP/MQTT protocol support
  • Wide range of wired and wireless communication protocols (Wi-Fi, 3G/LTE, GPS, Bluetooth, ZigBee, etc.)
  • Industrial-grade components and casing with DIN rail mounting

Compare with other solutions

Watch ModBerry website for upcoming updates. More industrial solutions coming in 2017!

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IoT Market growth in 2017

The Internet of Things (IoT), constantly develops in many fields, such as everyday objects, wearables, appliances, and vehicles in the cloud. The enormous growth is also expected for industrial applications. Industry 4.0 Ecosystems bloomed over last year, and upcoming 2017-2020 will be the years of further IoT expansion.

Increased sales of IoT processors and the expansion of IoT ecosystems fuel market growth in IoT analytics, which organize the information gathered from those devices into actionable data. Two key companies to watch in this field are networking giant Cisco and Amazon.

Cisco, one of the largest networking equipment companies in the world, started integrating analytics services into its hardware in 2014 through its “Connected Analytics for the Internet of Everything” initiative. Since then, the company has acquired numerous cloud and IoT companies to bolster that effort. In February, Cisco announced its intent to acquire Jasper Technologies, a leading IoT service platform for businesses and service providers.

Amazon owns AWS (Amazon Web Services), the largest cloud-based platform as a service in the world. AWS is generally known for hosting websites and data, but the company has been aggressively adding new analytics services for businesses. One such service is AWS for IoT, a new platform which enables Amazon to collect and analyze data from IoT devices for a fee.
© The Motley Fool

The annual growth in IoT fields multiplies the number of IoT devices used. It might be a huge opportunity for IT companies, but also a massive challenge for fog and cloud integration of IoT ecosystems. The fast development of these solutions and it’s influence on the market carries potentially unimaginable benefits of using Internet of Things Ecosystems.

The above summary and forecast was made in 2014. Since then, the rate of growth has increased so rapidly, that current Intel predicitons quadruples the number of connected IoT devices.

Intel estimates that the number of connected devices worldwide will surge from 15 billion in 2015 to 200 billion in 2020. That comes out to about 26 smart devices gathering data from every person in the world. Intel’s optimistic forecast could certainly be tripped up by issues with conflicting standards, privacy, and security, but investors should still keep an eye on these key companies as the overall market expands.
© The Motley Fool

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Fog Computing in IoT Security Services

Implementation of IoT technologies in control and monitoring systems should take into account increasing issues in terms of security and data protection. According to Cisco and Intel experts, the implementation of technology in the cloud is both an opportunity and a challenge:

By adopting cloud-based web security, utilities have seized on a new opportunity to harden their defenses against a high number of security breaches. 56 percent of the security professionals in utilities say they use cloud-based web security, compared with 36 percent of the respondents in other industries, Cisco reported earlier this year.

But with the ability of the cloud to connect more things in more places on the IoT, the technology also opens up new points of attack. To solve this complex issue and make the most of the IoT, utilities need to rethink where and how to deploy security.
© Intel IoT Partnership


This fresh approach can be seen in the iModCloud IoT Ecosystem, which combines robust and high-performance industrial devices, control software called iMod and iModCloud (service-in-cloud). The result is a “fog computing” solution that takes into account high value and confidentiality of data.

Many industries and utilities are adopting the IoT and cloud to analyze disparate sources of data to boost efficiency. For the utility industry, the ability to acquire and process smart grid data presents bottom-line value in addition to benefiting consumers and the environment.

Research conducted by Zpryme for Oracle Utilities found that 45 percent of utilities currently use the cloud and 52 percent plan to do so. Despite relatively high levels of adoption, the research also found persistent concerns about privacy, control and security.
© Intel IoT Partnership

Newest fog computing solutions are iModCloudBOX and iModCloudHOST. All the data logging and monitoring takes place in local or remote system, that can be placed inside or outside the installation. The data is fully encrypted and the data transfer is secured with SSL protocol.

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Challenges of Industry 4.0

According to our expert, in case of modernization of systems to the standard of Industry 4.0, enterprises represent these two positions:

  • Implementation of IoT is too difficult and we will not implement it,
  • We will do everything ourselves.

Due to the fact that each layer of the full implementation must be based on hardware, software and integration between these elements, and the development of the highest layers (User Interface, Cloud Computing) takes a minimum of one year to perform all operations on its own and does not bring the desired effect. At this time, we can see many ongoing projects on the market, without finished product ready for sale.

Moreover, it seems that the creators of the current IoT products do not always understand how to effectively sell the service. The purpose is often a mass distribution of the finished product. The final service for the end customer should be simple and ready to buy, as in the supermarket, and not by leasing, installment, complex contract options, conditions of use and security. The price of the finished product should contain calculated risks.

To meet these challenges the market has developed a need for a ready-to-use platform type Fog Computing (integrated hardware and software) such as iModCloud Ecosystem. It connects end devices (sensors, production machinery) to the logic contained in the controllers (IoT so-called gateway) with a layer of Cloud Computing (Big Data, Inference, User Interface).

Statement by our expert showed in Appendix Factory 4.0 for the December issue of Control Engineering (link below):

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What is the term “The Internet of Things embedded devices” mean?

What is the term “The Internet of Things embedded devices” mean and how did it influence the development of our iModCloud system?

The Internet of things embedded devices is a concept that describes how devices communicate with each other via a computer network, exchanging, processing and collecting data. The network might include devices as well as services which go beyond the communication standard M2M (machine to machine). They operate among multiple domain protocols and applications and use data analysis in order to get useful information. This was the foundation on which we designed and developed our powerful iModCloud system which we will explain in detail below.

The Internet already consists of hundreds of millions devices and soon the number will be much larger than that. Certain groups of connected devices form systems and some form even more complex systems that exchange and analyse data in the Cloud.

Continue reading “What is the term “The Internet of Things embedded devices” mean?”