It is 129 years old, pedal-operated, and an outstanding example of Industry 1.0 – the cast-iron lathe weighing 300 kg that Rexroth has brought along to Nuremberg for this year‘s show. In those days it cost 507 marks, the equivalent of 30,000 euros or more today. In other words: “Machines were already a big investment in those days, and still are“, says Dr Steffen Haack of the Bosch Rexroth executive, adding, “Consequently we must make as efficient use of them as possible. Networking with other machines and higher-level systems supports us decisively in doing that.“

But many machines in trade and industry still have no Industry 4.0 tie-up. They lack things like sensors, software or connection to corporate IT systems, and thus essential requirements for networked manufacturing. In Germany alone, reckons Haack, it concerns some tens of million machines. In part as a retrofit solution Rexroth has thus developed its own IoT gateway, presented at SPS IPC Drives for the first time, and catapulting the lathe into the age of Industry 4.0.

The hardware of this IoT gateway, consisting of an IndraControl XM, is IP20 graded for control cabinet installation. The software running on this is based on the Linux operating system. With the integrated Java virtual machine, Java-based applications and corresponding cloud services are developed through an OSGi framework. Different Java apps for typical application scenarios are provided by the IoT gateway for fast implementation. A web-based dashboard gives the user a detailed overview of collected data of the devices app in realtime. Sensor and process values can then be readied in the processing app and forwarded to different IoT services for data capture and analysis. The supported sensor spectrum ranges from digital and analog interfaces based on the scaled I/O portfolio IndraControl S20 through Bluetooth low energy to USB and RFID.

At the Hanover Fair Rexroth already presented the WebConnector, a further component for linking automation to the IoT. Asked about the difference from the IoT gateway, Haack answers: “WebConnector focuses on web-based visualization of a machine. But the IoT gateway serves as a plug&play solution for simple capture of process variables and parameters of a machine in realtime to forward them to higher-level systems for analysis.“ 

The new IoT gateway comes both standalone and as part of a customized i4.0 upgrade kit from Bosch Rexroth including, for example, extra IoT-based solutions of Bosch Software Innovations, like the production performance manager. The software collects the information in a visualization, and forwards specified events to defined persons. Communication can also work by the machine language PPMP (production performance management protocol) recently presented by Bosch. This protocol, linking machines to corporate IT, concentrates on the essential content of a message without unnecessarily increasing complexity of implementation. “Publishing code through Eclipse makes things transparent, characteristics that count, what data make sense in use for networking,“ explains Haack.