What can I use CtrlX for in my home brewery?

[Garrian]

Hi there,

I've just bought a CtrlX controller for testing and learning, and I intended to use this for my fully automated home brewery. The brewery consists of 3 seperated PLCs, that today publish data via OPCUA, and the SCADA systems is OPCUA Client, and retrieve data from all PLCs. This actually works really well.

So, actrually, I am not sure what I should use the CtrlX for, but I wanna test it out somehow. So, I was hoping anyone could help be getting started, and suggest some useful usecases. My initial idea was to collect data from all PLCs, then publish all data via MQTT. And also log data to MySQL.

Any tips and idea for usecases and how to approach is very appreciated, thanks 🙂

[nickH · Accepted solution]

Hi Garrian,

The ctrlX CORE is really flexible and suits a lot of use cases. The flexibility comes by using the App Technology. You can choose between many different applications from the ctrlX Store and install the Apps which you need for your usecase. The Apps vary from classic PLC-Runtimes, EtherCAT Master, OPC UA Client and Server or IoT Apps like Node Red, Mosquitto Broker, InfluxDB and many more.

The ctrlX CORE is also perfect for IoT Use cases with Apps like Node Red, InfluxDB or IoT Dashboard (Grafana). Do you have some experience with Node Red? I think in Node Red it's easy to subscribe to data (which comes from a OPC UA Client App for example), process this data, display the data and send it further (e.g. with Mqtt or to a database).

Here is some more information which can help you:

• Basic How-Tos to get started
• How Tos and example applications about IoT 
• Influencer Videos, which can also give you some ideas what you can do with the ctrlX CORE

And feel free to ask me, when you got some further questions. 

Best regards,

Nick