miles of wire connecting hundreds of devices, a simple two-wire pair could be daisy-chained from
one device to the next to the next. Modbus was revolutionary for its time.
al protocol; Modbus was the right technology at the
right time. The first microprocessor a simple 8-bit processor with severely limited code space
and memory - even invented until shortly before the birth of Modbus.
THE INTERNET OF THINGS (IOT) WORLD
There are more words written about IoT than any other topic of the last 40 years. What some
out of factory floor systems and moving it into business systems and databases throughout the
enterprise.
This too started out crudely with operators writing operating data on sheets that were later
keypunched and loaded onto magnetic tape. Once a week the tapes were loaded, data reports
were run, and then dropped
snail-
Eventually, many factories had people walk around the factory floor collecting memory sticks out
of devices, carrying them back to their desks, uploading the data, converting it and then, finally,
loading it into a database. Rudimentary to say the least, but effective because only the most
important data was collected.
Ultimately, many of the larger manufacturing companies spent massive sums to build proprietary
systems that could move production, quality and other operational data from their manufacturing
systems to an MES or ERP system automatically. Those systems were complicated, slow and a
nightmare to maintain, but they worked.
IoT in manu
new is that we now have technologies that make it easier than ever to accomplish. But that, in
fact, is our biggest problem. It is now so very easy to move data to the cloud that we have all sorts
of manufacturers putting data there with no idea as to why. In many cases, there is no business
model, no monetization plan, no thought about ROI no plan at all for how to use the data. Many
engineers have these hammers in their toolbox (MQTT, AMQP, OPC UA) so they just start
swinging away. There are statistics from Cisco and others that indicate that only one in four IoT
projects achieve an ROI.
In fairness, C-suite people are pushing these engineering staffs to implement IoT as they are
