Weidmuller's Data Hub Furthers its Open Approach to Industrial Automation Integration
- Data Hub supports REST, NATS and Real Time APIs in a single platform — u-OS.
- Traditional network communication delays are eliminated by providing direct backplane access to bypass the need for Ethernet, PHY and MAC layer connections.
- A conveyance industry user scaled from Node-Red analytics dashboarding to low-latency command control without system redesign using Data Hub.
As manufacturing agility becomes increasingly dependent on data flow between disparate automation devices and software, Weidmuller has introduced what it calls an industry-first approach to industrial controller connectivity. The company's new Data Hub, integrated into its u-OS, is reportedly designed to eliminate the traditional barriers that have long frustrated engineers attempting to integrate diverse automation systems.
Ken Crawford, senior director of automation at Weidmuller USA, said Data Hub allows “machine builders, system integrators and plant operators to easily interact with u-OS’s I/O modules to access essential data and make variables from one application visible to another.”
Triple API support
A primary feature of Data Hub is its support for the REST, NATS and Real Time application programming interfaces (APIs) within a single platform. Weidmuller says this trinity of connectivity options addresses the full spectrum of industrial automation needs, from enterprise-level cloud integration down to mission-critical control loops.
Here’s how they’re used in Data Hub:
- REST APIs handle the IT and cloud connectivity for analytics, dashboarding and enterprise resource planning (ERP) integration. Weidmuller included REST (Representational State Transfer) in its Data Hub because most programming languages include native or near-native REST support.
- The Real Time API is engineered for deterministic communications that industrial control applications like Codesys require.
- The NATS (Neural Autonomic Transport System) API fills the middle ground with a lightweight publish-subscribe communications protocol designed for distributed event streaming with minimal latency. It’s often used for data communications at the embedded level.
In its release about Data Hub’s availability, Weidmuller noted that, while it is focused on opening automation system access with its u-OS and Data Hub, industrial-grade security is maintained through role-based access controls and authentication mechanisms.
Addressing common automation integration headaches
For system integrators and plant engineers, Data Hub was developed to addresses a persistent industry pain point: the need for proprietary gateways, middleware licenses and complex programming to achieve basic inter-system communication.
Christopher Deloglos, Weidmuller's strategic product manager, explained that the goal is extending the company’s open automation vision by allowing different software components to interact directly with the operating system, hardware and I/O modules without proprietary barriers.
"We're opening up access for third-party software to take full usage of u-OS and the u-OS hardware," Deloglos said. This approach eliminates the approval processes and licensing fees that have traditionally limited controller access to authorized partners only.
Crawford drew a contrast between u-OS and Data Hub and existing open systems: "Even with open systems like BME (bus master enable) or CompactPCI, to run applications on a controller you need to go through licensed programmers and pay fees. With Data Hub, we're making it available to everyone through an open architecture system, which gives them access to the ASIC on our backplane to get to the I/O for free. That's really unheard of in the industry.”
He added that Weidmuller’s approach with Data Hub is essentially the same as using a virtual machine or hypervisor, where “you run two machines inside of one using Ethernet as the connection between them. The difference here is that a virtual Ethernet connection is used.”
This allows Data Hub's architecture to eliminate network connections to the computer, like the Ethernet port on the industrial PC and the PHY (physical) and MAC (media access control) layers, Crawford said. Instead, Data Hub provides direct backplane access through what Deloglos describes as "more of a binded library implementation — which is a good thing for real-time interactions where even Ethernet may not provide fast enough speeds.”
Real-world applications
The practical benefits of Data Hub become clear through customer implementations. Deloglos described a conveyance industry customer who initially used Node-Red with the REST API for analytics dashboarding. When the customer needed to reverse the data flow for command-and-control functions requiring lower latency, the NATS API provided the necessary speed without requiring a complete system redesign.
This flexibility allows manufacturers to start with simple monitoring applications and gradually expand into more sophisticated control schemes as their needs evolve. For example, machine builders can connect Codesys variables, Node-Red flows and custom applications without detailed programming to scale projects as production requirements grow.
