basysKom Application Development Services

Announcing the umati Dashboard-OPC UA-Client
Essential Summary
The umati community did its first open source release of the “umati Dashboard OPC UA Client”. To support this effort basysKom has worked with the umati community and ported the client to the open62541 OPC UA stack.
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First, it is necessary to distinguish whether a server or a client is needed. An OPC UA server is the more common and also more complex case, as data is not consumed from an existing server but must be provided in a suitably defined model.

The umati community did its first open source release of the “umati Dashboard OPC UA Client“. To support this effort basysKom has worked with the umati community and ported the client to the open62541 OPC UA stack

umati Dashboard-OPC UA-Client

umati is the “universal machine technology interface” – a community of machine builders working together to create highly interoperable OPC UA interfaces (companion specifications). 

To showcase their efforts umati has developed a dashboard application hosted at https://umati.app. The dashboard demonstrates that machines of competing companies can be integrated in one common application via umati endorsed companion specifications. 

umati.app

Of course, the web interface is only the user facing layer of the showcase. Internally, there are a number of systems involved which are connected to the OPC UA servers on the individual machines, aggregating and persisting data and feeding the web interface. 

The primary mission of umati is promoting the use of different companion specifications with identical implementation across production equipment. Also the umati community develops a number of open source components which serve as reference implementations. 

You find an overview in the umati repository on github. The code behind umati.app is currently not open source, but the goal is to make it open source mid term.

Porting to open62541

As a first step towards being completely open source, the code for the “Dashboard OPC UA Client” is published today. 

The role of this component is to read and monitor machine data on an aggregating OPC UA server, and to push data changes onto an MQTT-broker (to which the actual web interface is connected to). This component is written in C++ and was using a commercial OPC UA SDK initially. This SDK prevented a meaningful open source release so far. 

basysKom has ported the code of the “umati Dashboard OPC UA Client” to the open62541 OPC UA stack.

basysKom has been umati partner since May 2021 (https://umati.org/umati-has-new-partner-basyskom/) and active contributor and commercial support partner to the open62541 project.

basysKom will be present as a guest of umati at the EMO MILANO 2021, 5 and 6 of October. We are looking forward to meeting you there.

Picture of Frank Meerkötter

Frank Meerkötter

Frank Meerkoetter is the Development Lead for basysKom GmbH, where he is consulting customers on industrial and embedded applications, often in combination with Qt. He is responsible for the technical consulting, system- and software-architecture within basysKom. He used to be the the maintainer of Qt OPC UA (2017-2024) and a contributor to the Qt project. He has a strong background in Embedded Linux, systems programming, distributed systems and application development. He holds a Master of Computer Science from the University of Applied Sciences in Darmstadt.

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