Node-RED and MTConnect

Recently I noticed a few visitors to this site were searching for information on MTConnect support in Node-RED.
I’ve never used Node-RED before, but thought this would be a good reason to take a first look at it.
…Recently I noticed a few visitors to this site were searching for information on MTConnect support in Node-RED.
I’ve never used Node-RED before, but thought this would be a good reason to take a first look at it.
…A step-by-step guide to installing and configuring the MTConnect Agent, and an update to my earlier article, “Set up an MTConnect Agent in three or so steps“.
…If you’re curious, like me, about what software tools are being widely used in manufacturing, Okuma has given us a peek at the most popular machine tool apps in their app store.
And number one on their list is… (spoilers)
…This week I was working with TrakHound’s MTConnect.NET library again, but all my test connections were failing.
I had been testing against the MTConnect Institute’s demo agent, which is now run by NIST. I opened it in my browser and got a 404 Not Found. So I went up one level and saw this…
…About five years ago I wrote 5 ways to access MTConnect data from a web application. This article outlined methods for accessing the MTConnect agent’s data from a client-side web application.
Ignore it. Much has changed in web development since then, and some of the methods mentioned in the old article range from bad to obsolete. If you want to write an MTConnect web application, here are your best options:
Eight years ago when I first encountered MTConnect, I felt the technology would transform the machine shop. Today, support for MTConnect is commonplace in new machine tools, and often available for older tools through various upgrade options. Software packages exist to collect and analyze data on a server or on the cloud. However, I thought the technology could become a lightweight option not only for data analytics, but also for basic machine shop automation.
Recently I tried to run the TrakHound MTConnect components on Linux, without success. It seems, though, that TrakHound’s MTConnect.NET library can be made to work within a .NET Core 2.0 application relatively easily.
No. At least, I’ve had no luck running any of the TrakHound components on Linux.
In a previous post I mentioned that I could not try the TrakHound community software, since I do not have a Windows machine. Afterwards I wondered how true that was. After all, Wine does a decent job running most Windows software, and .NET support on Linux has gotten much better in recent years. So I thought it was worth a shot.
If you are trying to implement basic machine monitoring in your shop on a shoestring budget, and your machine tools are already MTConnect aware, Raspberry Pi provides an inexpensive solution.
* Cost of Raspberry Pi kit only. MTConnect adapter solutions, networking, etc. may cost extra.
A long time ago on a blog far, far away, I wrote an article called “Set up an MTConnect Agent in three or so steps”. This became one of the most visited articles I have ever written, and is still being viewed four years later. However, much has changed in the MTConnect world in the past four years, so I wanted to take another look at installing an MTConnect agent. …