IOTech announces a new release of Edge Xrt

UK edge software company IOTech has announced the general availability of Edge Xrt v2.1, the latest release of its edge connectivity solution designed for time-critical and embedded OT applications for the industrial IoT.

Edge Xrt can concurrently connect to many different OT device endpoints that are using a variety of industrial protocols (such as Modbus, BACnet, OPC UA, EtherCAT, etc), and read/write data from these devices at high volume and low latency. Normalised data is made available to applications via MQTT/JSON. The new release also adds the ability to normalise the data based on the OPC UA data model that a client application can access via a new OPC UA server component. OPC UA has become the de facto communication standard for Industry 4.0 and smart manufacturing systems.

IOTech said that with its small memory footprint and efficient use of computing resources, Edge Xrt is also suitable for applications where CPU and memory resources are limited. This therefore also makes it suitable for use cases such as connected commercial or consumer electronic devices (eg, refrigeration units), medical device applications, automotive engine management systems, and microcontroller applications.

“With its configurable, high-performance and embeddable connectivity capabilities, Edge Xrt is unique in its ability to serve the needs of the growing industrial IoT market,” said Andrew Foster, product director at IOTech. “It provides a rich set of OT connectivity capabilities that make it easy for our customers to access their valuable industrial data. In most cases, this is through simple configuration or dynamic device discovery and without the need for custom code.”

In addition to the inclusion of an OPC UA server, the new release also adds extended device discovery capabilities so that EtherNet/IP endpoints can be dynamically discovered and onboarded without the need for users to perform manual configuration.

There have also been 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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