New White Paper and Webinar about MQTT Sparkplug
This past year, we have seen an increased interest from manufacturing and industrial automation companies who are undertaking smart factory or digitization projects to modernize the software used in their operations. A key hindrance for these projects is the proprietary nature of the hardware and software that is installed in many existing operations. The proprietary data silos that have been created has made it difficult for sharing data with new applications like data analytics and machine learning.
Many of these companies are looking to MQTT to be the data sharing protocol to modernize their software and hardware investments. New IoT gateways are being added in-front of sensors and PLCs that don’t have connectivity or speak a proprietary protocol. New modern PLC and equipment will now support MQTT out of the box.
The Sparkplug specification is built on top of MQTT that defines common data formats and topic namespaces to allow for interoperability between different hardware and software manufacturers. HiveMQ is involved in the Sparkplug specification process and we are active in the Sparkplug working group.
MQTT Sparkplug Resources
Chapters
- 07:55 - Introduction to MQTT technology
- 14:06 - Introduction to Sparkplug
- 15:07 - Sparkplug key concepts
- 18:00 - MQTT Sparkplug architecture
- 21:18 - Edge of Network (EoN) Nodes
- 22:21 - MQTT Application Nodes
- 23:19 - MQTT broker
- 24:45 - HiveMQ MQTT Platform
- 28:00 - Demo
- 54:30 - Q&A
This week, to help educate our community about Sparkplug, we have published a webinar recording and a white paper that compares OPC UA and MQTT Sparkplug.
The Sparkplug webinar introduces the core concepts of Sparkplug and then a live demo with our partner Opto 22. Opto22 sells PLC and IoT gateways that are MQTT and Sparkplug enabled. During the demo, they show how to connect their devices to an instance of HiveMQ Cloud that published the MQTT data into an InfluxDB/Grafana dashboard. A very informative presentation and demo.
Our new Sparkplug white paper is a deep dive into two IIoT protocols: OPC UA and Sparkplug. If you want to understand the difference between these two protocols, we highly recommend reading this white paper.
We will also continue to publish our Sparkplug Essentials blog series to educate people on the specific Sparkplug features.
Feel free to reach out if you want to discuss how Sparkplug can help with your digitization project.
Ian Skerrett
Ian is a growth-oriented marketing leader focused on B2B infrastructure, IoT, and IIoT software with over 25 years experience in the software industry. He spent 13 years with the Eclipse Foundation and was Vice President of Marketing for HiveMQ until September 2022.
