It is 129 years old, pedal-operated and a prime example of Industry 1.0 - the 300 kg cast-iron lathe that Rexroth brought to Nuremberg this year. It cost 507 marks - equivalent to around 30,000 to 40,000 euros by today's standards. In other words: "Machines were a major investment back then and still are today," says Dr. Steffen Haack, member of the Bosch Rexroth Management Board, adding: "So we have to use them as efficiently as possible. Networking with other machines and higher-level systems helps us to achieve this."

However, many machines in trade or manufacturing are still without an Industry 4.0 connection. Among other things, they lack sensors, software or a connection to the company's IT systems - and therefore essential prerequisites for networked production. According to Haack, this affects tens of millions of machines in Germany alone. Rexroth has therefore developed its own IoT gateway, partly as a retrofit solution, which will be presented for the first time at SPS IPC Drives and will catapult the lathe in question into the Industry 4.0 age at the Lohr stand.

The hardware of the IoT gateway, consisting of an IndraControl XM controller, meets protection class IP20 for control cabinet installation. The software running on it is based on the Linux operating system. The integrated Java virtual machine is used to develop Java-based applications and corresponding cloud services via an OSGi framework. Various Java apps for typical application scenarios are provided with the IoT gateway for quick commissioning. The web-based dashboard provides the user with a detailed overview of the data collected by the 'Devices App' in real time. Sensor and process values can then be pre-processed in the processing app and forwarded to various IoT services for data collection and analysis. The supported sensor spectrum ranges from digital and analog interfaces based on the scaled IndraControl S20 I/O portfolio to Bluetooth Low Energy, USB and RFID.

With the WebConnector, Rexroth had already presented another component for connecting automation to the IoT at the Hannover Messe. When asked about the difference or differentiation from the IoT gateway, Haack replies: "The WebConnector focuses on the web-based visualization of a machine. The IoT gateway, on the other hand, serves as a plug-and-play solution for the simple recording of process variables and parameters of a machine in real time in order to forward them to higher-level systems for analysis."

The new IoT gateway is available both as a stand-alone solution and as part of an individually customized 'i4.0 Upgrade Kit' from Bosch Rexroth, which also includes IoT-based solutions from Bosch Software Innovations, such as the Production Performance Manager. The software brings together the collected information in a visualization and forwards specified events to defined persons. Communication can also take place via the machine language PPMP recently presented by Bosch. The protocol for connecting machines to the company's IT focuses on the essential content of a message without unnecessarily increasing the complexity of implementation. "By disclosing the code via Eclipse, it becomes transparent which key figures are important, i.e. which data should be used for networking," explains Haack.