As the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) gains ground in the industrial sector, there's a growing demand for on-demand access to IIoT data. Remote review of process data without the need for extra software is increasingly sought after. Ewon devices, primarily known for remote access, are extending their usage beyond by offering robust data capabilities for core Industrial IoT implementations.
Discover the numerous possibilities to extract and manipulate process data with Ewon Flexy, both locally and in the cloud. In this blog post, we aim to showcase a comprehensive overview of its features, focusing on the most common and powerful data tools at your disposal.
1. Talk2m APIs
Talk2m offers multiple APIs that can be used to enhance IoT applications. The benefit to using an API as opposed to more rigid data extraction methodologies, is that the developer is not tethered to a single interface. This frees the application developer to create applications for desktop, mobile, and the web.
All Talk2m API offerings return JSON data, the most widely used and accepted data format, making it easier to integrate with existing 3rd party platforms.
The M2web API is a restful API offering direct real-time access to your remote Ewon devices. By utilizing the Talk2m infrastructure, users can gather data securely from any application. By using industry standard JSON implementations, the data gathered from the M2web API can easily be integrated into various systems.
M2web API benefits:
Unlike the M2web API, the Datamailbox API centers on historical trended data. The Datamailbox allows users to retrieve large amounts of data and export it anywhere in the world without the need for a public facing database.
Datamailbox benefits:
While Ewon devices offer robust implementation options, sometimes they do not meet the need of specific applications. In scenarios such as this, you have at your disposal two different development engines. Through the usage of programmatic interfaces, a user can develop a highly customized application to suit their needs. Through the programming engines, it is possible to override default feature sets as well as execute custom data exports to services such as Dropbox and Thingworx. The programming engines are not one size fits all however, and each has their specific use case.
MQTT is a lightweight IoT messaging protocol. The power of MQTT is the ability to send and receive near real time data with a relatively lightweight data footprint. With the release of firmware 12.2s1, the Ewon Flexy now offers full MQTT support. The MQTT client built into the Flexy is quite versatile and is able to integrate with several 3rd party providers including ThingSpeak.
MQTT benefits:
The BASIC scripting engine is a customized implementation of beginners’ all-purpose symbolic instruction code. The BASIC engine offers a wide tool set for interacting directly with the Ewon and third-party devices or services.
BASIC scripting benefits:
JAVA is one of the most widely used programming languages in the world. Prior to firmware version 12.2 the Ewon was limited to JAVA micro edition. While powerful, the ME JAVA implementation lacked a few core features that users wanted out of a robust development solution. Post firmware 12.2 the Ewon devices now support JAVA SE 1.6. By supporting JAVA SE, Ewon devices now open the door to a far wider range of 3rd party JAVA libraries and tool sets.
JAVA development benefits:
While extracting the data from a device may be beneficial, there are times when simply visualizing the information directly on the hardware can be useful. By doing this you can view the data in a clean manner without the need to connect the device to the internet. This can be extremely useful for developing factory floor dashboards to visualize your machine functions. The Ewon Flexy sports a full web server that can be used to serve up various web pages. Web pages hosted on the Ewon can be quite complex and can be developed to interact directly with the Ewon internal systems. This can include tag updating and historical trend viewing.
Custom web page benefits:
By combining several of the tools and features previously discussed in this post, we can override some of the core Ewon reporting tools. By overriding the default tools, we can create custom historical log files, event logs or other core reports. Custom reports can be exported in the same manner as any other Ewon report. This offers the flexibility to send the data via email, sms, ftp or any method needed.
At HMS Networks, we believe that connectivity matters and we pride ourselves in offering the number one choice for easy and secure remote access to your machine data and industrial equipment.