Industry 4.0 is a paradigm that enhances industrial automation systems with the recent advances in the domain of the Internet of Things (IoT), gaining new possibilities and providing new services. Traditional industrial machines do not have IoT capabilities, and in order to integrate such a machine into Industry 4.0, there is a need for an intermediary device or system that communicates with the machine through its supported communication interfaces and protocols and forwards the communication to the global network. This paper presents the development and experimental validation of a low-cost hardware module that can easily integrate the machine’s existing control unit into the IoT and enable synchronization of the measurements and states of the variables of the machine and its environment with a cloud server. The developed module is universal, can connect to any control unit that is able to communicate through basic RS232 serial communication, and does not require the control unit to have any higher level communication protocol implemented. On the other end, the presented solution uses a dedicated smartphone application to provide remote monitoring and control of the machine through the cloud by using the synchronized variable states, as well as further possibilities for storing, processing, and analyzing the historical data from the system. The developed solution was experimentally validated on an experimental setup consisting of a conveyor belt driven by a three-phase asynchronous electromotor controlled by a programmable logic controller through a variable-frequency drive.
Extending Legacy Industrial Machines by a Low-Cost Easy-to-Use IoT Module for Data Acquisition