IOTech announces a major new release of Edge XRT software

UK edge software company IOTech has announced the general availability of Edge XRT v2.0. This is a major release of its open software platform designed for time-critical and embedded OT applications at the industrial IoT edge.

Edge XRT 2.0 is designed to greatly simplify the development of OT applications and enable faster time to market for new edge systems. It is hardware agnostic and independent of the silicon provider (Intel or ARM) and operating system. Users have complete deployment flexibility. They can deploy it as a native application, containerised or into a virtualised environment.

With its small memory footprint and efficient use of computing resources, Edge XRT 2.0 is also suitable for microcontroller-based applications where CPU and memory resources are limited. This makes it suitable for use cases such as connected commercial or consumer electronic devices (for example, refrigeration units), medical device applications or automotive engine management systems.

The product’s open APIs make third-party application integration very easy. Major industrial OEMs and ISVs are leveraging the product’s multi-vendor OT connectivity, cloud interoperability and high-performance, real-time edge processing capabilities to create a new generation of protocol-agnostic edge solutions. Partners include Siemens, Schneider Electric, Johnson Controls, Infor and Thales.

“As a configurable, embeddable, high-performance OT platform, Edge XRT 2.0 is unique,” said Andrew Foster, Product Director at IOTech. “It provides a rich set of OT and IoT capabilities that our customers can easily use to create their own edge solutions. In most cases, this is through simple configuration without the need for lots of custom code.”

The new release adds a number of important features including:

• In addition to the existing pluggable OT connectivity for Modbus, EtherNet/IP, EtherCAT, BACnet and OPC UA protocols, the platform now supports Profinet, S7, GPS and BLE.
• For protocols that support device discovery such as OPC UA, BACnet and EtherNet/IP, devices can be discovered and then on-boarded easily without any manual configuration.
• A new MQTT API allows Edge XRT clients to easily manage the lifecycle of connected devices and sensors, support read/write OT data access, control device discovery and resource scheduling.
• When deployed on an Azure Sphere device, an Edge XRT application can now be dynamically configured and reconfigured via a Device Twin running on Azure IoT Hub.
• IOTech has made scalability and performance improvements to address customer demand for concurrent access to an increasing number of OT devices and their data.

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Edge XRT is designed for high-performance edge computing use cases, such as industrial control and real-time signal processing applications across a variety of vertical markets. These include factory automation, renewable energy, building management, retail and hospitality. It also enables integration between the real-time edge applications and higher-level enterprise IT, SCADA and cloud applications.

Top image credit: ©stock.adobe.com/au/Michael Traitov