The concept of of building and factory automation is gaining momentum by the day. The advent of IoT as a technology has acted as a catalyst towards the same. Our team at WeMakeIoT has experience and expertise in handling building automation projects especially working with PLC and PAC’s. Real time IoT Dashboards are used for monitoring and plotting data coming from the sensors.

These connected applications can provide with brilliant visualizations which can help the users analyze their offerings in a better way. In this article i will try to throw some light on how controllers like PLC can combine with IOT dashboards to provide a complete automation solutions for the user.

Controllers and IoT Dashboards

Controllers like embedded or industrial PLC already have hardware capability to interface with local network. IoT dashboards along with dedicated protocols like MQTT, COAP etc. expands the capabilities of controllers over cloud.  Existing platforms like Amazon Web Services, Azure, and IBM Bluemix etc. have the capability to handle IoT protocols.

The popular single board computing hardware like Raspberry Pi, Beaglebone, Intel Edison which are powered by ARM processor are the main IoT enablers. Please check out our blog on STM32 controller powered by ARM processor. These controllers can simultaneously interface with sensors as well as the cloud without any human intervention.

The PSoC like controllers also contributed a lot of improvements in IoT controllers design.  SoC Devices like ESP8266, Particle Photon & Electron are the controller which has mainly used for low power low Computing IoT applications. BLE driven beacons and sensors also received great acceptance due to its low power consumption.

Manufactures made gateway units which can interact with Industrial controllers like PLC with cloud. The accessibilities of SCADA are normally limited to their local network, but IoT Dashboards along with Industrial controllers and gateway unit makes a user friendly Industrial IoT solution.