IoT gateway helps engineers get started with the industrial Internet of Things

RS Components is extending its portfolio of industrial IoT devices with exclusive supply of the innovative SIMATIC IOT2020 open and flexible IoT gateway. Market analyst predictions are that devices connected to the Internet will number in the tens of billions in the coming years. A key global trend in IoT technology driving this growth is the increasing availability of open source software, including easy-to-use IDEs, and ever-improving hardware. Siemens and RS joined forces to offer an IoT platform for the engineers of tomorrow, and the gateway encapsulates these trends, providing the simplest way for engineers to get started with the industrial IoT and meet the challenges of an increasingly connected world. This open and flexible IoT gateway is designed for continuous industrial operation and comes with the appropriate certificates. It can be used to retrieve, process, analyse and send data to almost any kind of device or network due to its various interfaces including Ethernet, USB and micro SD. The gateway is compatible with open source software such as the Arduino IDE and Yocto Linux, to benefit from programming in high-level languages such as Java, C++ and JSON. This openness enables various communication possibilities to further automation hardware or sensors via Modbus, PROFINET or other protocols, or even the direct connection to cloud solutions via MQTT or AMQP. In addition to the on-board interfaces, it is expandable with Arduino shields and via an on-board PCIe port. As an industrial certified product with UL and CE approval, it is perfectly suited for educational purposes. It meets the many requirements of schools and universities to provide students with the platform to get a rapid experience of practical development and also allows start-ups and makers to develop ideas in an open way into professional applications and projects. “With years of experience serving customers in the electronics and industrial sectors, RS has been proudly part of the evolution of the technology in both of these spaces. The open source technology embraced by Arduino has simplified and speeded up electronic prototyping, while Siemens has been a key actor in bringing industrial automation at levels of reliability and interconnectivity that were simply unbelievable 10 years ago,” commented Paolo Carnovale, head of industrial product marketing at RS. “The SIMATIC IOT2020 is building a bridge between the two worlds and will provide the engineers of the future with the necessary flexibility to develop new amazing industrial IoT applications.”