Hey, Shahpour from RealPars here, I'm with Martin again.
We are at SPS Show here in Nuremberg Germany and
Martin has something really cool... like an application from PLCnext
that wants to share with you guys.
Yeah, okay thanks Shahpour. So what we're showing is
how to remotely control a machine from several hundred kilometers away.
So, what we have is a... on my desk, in my office in Bad Pyrmont, near Hannover.
That’s about 300 kilometers away.
We have a PLC that is running Node-RED.
And that's listening... That's subscribed to an MQTT broker
and it's waiting for commands to come through from that MQTT broker
and the way we're going to publish commands to that broker
is using this voice control unit.
So, this is a voice recognition unit.
It will translate my voice commands into JSON strings
and then will publish those JSON strings to an MQTT Broker
So... just one question.
This setup that we have here doesn't have anything to do with what we have?
No, this is running different applications for demonstrations...
So, this is like a different thing... you can filter this one when you watching.
So, This is, the setup that we have... it is this one that is connected to the computer
Yeah, so, this is connected directly to the internet
and this is really just a copy of the PLC that's running on my desk back in my office.
So, that's what it looks like in my office.
We've got this voice control box connected to the PLC.
And it's waiting for my voice commands. When it hears the correct command,
it will send the JSON string up to an MQTT broker in the cloud.
Hopefully, this PLC on my desk will hear that command
and it will operate the machine. So, I'll give it a try.
So, our voice control unit is called Bob. So, I'll just say hello to him.
Hello Bob...
Machine on.
And now we see the green light goes on
on the machine and we see the actuators pushing a little parcel around on the machine,
and after a few seconds everything retracts.
And then we see the parcel get conveyed onto another platform
and then the light goes off. The operation is complete.
So that's just the demonstration of how we can use MQTT
just open source libraries in software on a PLCnext Control
to control machines remotely.
... and also maybe you can share some information about
how these connections work.
So, in this case, we're using a public MQTT broker from a crowd called Mosquitto.
They host a public MQTT Broker.
It's like a cloud... a different version of a cloud service?
Yeah... you could treat it like a cloud service.
So, this is also applicable for Amazon Web Services if you use AWS
or if you use Microsoft Azure,
you can also use the same principle to send MQTT messages
or messages in any other format that is supported by that cloud service.
You can send those messages directly from a PLCnext control up to those cloud services
and yeah… and then do whatever you want to do once it's in the cloud service,
including remote control of the machine.
Yeah, this is very cool, what we have here.
So, we are sending the voice command just as Martin said like "machine on".
It goes to the cloud and then from the cloud, we're connected to the cloud,
and we are at the south of Germany,
and this setup is in the north of Germany, Bad Pyrmont.
And then we send it to the cloud,
and this set up is receiving the data from the cloud,
and that's how we can control this machine from this distance.
So, this is a very cool application of what you can do with a PLC...
you can just say "machine on",
and you can turn on the machine
regardless of where you are in the world,
which is very cool for me.
Yeah, and people have implemented something similar
using Alexa or using Google Assistant as the voice control unit,
which is obviously free or if you have those devices.
So, you can actually control your PLCnext control using Alexa or using your Google Assistant.
Now in an industrial application, some people aren't so comfortable with
their data going through Google servers.
So, this MQTT application that we have here,
you can set that up as a completely private cloud service.
Your own private MQTT broker on your own private webserver.
You can encrypt your messages using transport layer security, X.509 certificates.
The whole thing is secure and controlled by you.
So, you can either do this with something like Alexa or Google Assistant or Google Home,
or if you are concern about the security of the data you can have your own Alexa.
Yeah that's right. So, this is a third-party device from another manufacturer.
More like an industrial version of that.
Yeah, exactly and you can do all this through your own private cloud services.
So, we sort of cater for all those different possibilities.
Okay, thanks guys for watching!
We just wanted to share this with you; I think you'll find it interesting as well.
See you later!