OPC-UA

Hi there Solace Community,

My next device that will try to use has OPC-UA, but from what I read until now about this topic, the only way to connect to this to the broker will be through MQTT PubSub.

Is there or do You know if it will in a future, a way to connect directly a device that uses the OPC-UA to the Solace Broker, or it will always needed to use the MQTT broker integration of the OPC-UA PubSub?

Best regards,
Valdemar Leiras

Comments

  • marc
    marc Member, Administrator, Moderator, Employee Posts: 914 admin

    Hi @ValdemarLeiras,

    Welcome to the Solace Community!

    I'm not familiar with OPC-UA, but it looks like it's own protocol and is not currently supported by Solace Event Brokers. Currently pretty much all of our IoT use cases (that I'm aware of) connect using MQTT so that would be my recommended path forward without knowing more details about your use case. I won't say that we will never support OPC-UA as a protocol but it hasn't been highly requested so I don't see it being added in the near term.

    Please feel free to share more about your project, I always love hearing what everyone is building with our technology!

    Hope that helps.

  • swenhelge
    swenhelge Member, Employee Posts: 77 Solace Employee

    Hi,

    There is an OPC/UA version that uses MQTT as the transport but I guess you are dealing with legacy versions.

    Typically we deploy along side an edge gateway in the factory. The gateway serves as an adapter to legacy IoT protocols such as OPC/UA.

    We partner with a company that provides OPC/UA to MQTT bridging in order to provide an end to end solution, see https://solace.com/press-center/autosol/ and https://autosoln.com/solutions/eacm-edge-polling/

    If you are interested to learn more let me know via DM on the community and I can pass your contact details to the right person(s).

  • marc
    marc Member, Administrator, Moderator, Employee Posts: 914 admin

    Perfect, thanks @swenhelge. @ValdemarLeiras please let us know if you'd like to chat more and we'll get the right people in the room. I'll probably join to learn myself ;)

  • ValdemarLeiras
    ValdemarLeiras Member Posts: 3

    Hi there @marc and @swenhelge.

    Perfect help answers.

    Yes, I'll probably going to need more information and follow Your tips, but first I'm going to read a little more about the OPC-UA topic, in order to better understand how it really works, and if I really need that devices in the project.
    Probably I'm gonna in that direction, because everyone that I talk in the Industry tell me that in the future it is probably that the IIoT devices changes their protocols to the OPC-UA. But as I tell before, OPC-UA is a recent topic for me, and I don't feel comfortable to work with that yet.

    Thanks for all help, and when I have some more advances in this, We could chat more.

    Best Regards,
    Valdemar Leiras

  • Tamimi
    Tamimi Member, Administrator, Employee Posts: 491 admin

    Wasnt aware of the OPC/UA to MQTT bridging myself as well! That's good to hear. @ValdemarLeiras good luck with your project and please do share your findings here on the community I'm pretty sure other people might have the same wonders :)

  • swenhelge
    swenhelge Member, Employee Posts: 77 Solace Employee

    @ValdemarLeiras - when people are saying that everything moves towards OPC/UA hopefully they refer to newer versions that can utilise MQTT.
    See here - https://opcconnect.opcfoundation.org/2019/09/opc-ua-mqtt-a-popular-combination-for-iot-expansion/

    Traditional OPC/UA is basically a client-server architecture, not broker based.