Eclipse Sparkplug working group continues to drive adoption of IIot specifications

The Eclipse Foundation’s efforts to provide a standard for device communications in the evolving Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) space continues to attract participants. This week, the Foundation added a new name to its spark plug task force list: industrial automation and IIoT maker Opto 22.

Sparkplug is an open source software specification that provides creators of IIoT solutions using the OASIS Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) protocol with a framework to integrate data from their applications, sensors, devices and gateways within the MQTT infrastructure.

The Eclipse Foundation, which has hosted open-source implementations of the MQTT protocol since 2011, launched the Eclipse Sparkplug working group in 2020 “to broaden adoption of the Sparkplug topic and payload specification for MQTT.”

“With the rapid adoption of Sparkplug in several markets critical to industrial IoT, we are in an excellent position to bring together industry leaders to promote standardization around this transformative technology,” said Mike Milinkovich, Director executive of the Eclipse Foundation, in a previous article. declaration. “Sparkplug takes advantage of the ubiquitous MQTT standard already used in industry to provide standardized communications between industrial devices. The Sparkplug working group will help generate new levels of interoperability between devices and suppliers in the field of industrial automation. “

Opto 22 develops and manufactures hardware and software products based on open standards for industrial automation, process control, building automation, industrial refrigeration, remote monitoring, data acquisition and IIoT applications . The company has always supported the MQTT standard, starting in 2013 with the introduction of its groov product family. It added support for Sparkplug in 2017 shortly after the specification was released. Since then, Opto 22 has worked closely with other MQTT supporters, including Inductive Automation and Cirrus Link, the original developers of Sparkplug, to establish MQTT as the dominant protocol for IIoT.

Inductive Automation and Cirrus Link are both founding members of the Sparkplug Working Group, as are Chevron, Canary Labs, HiveMQ and ORing. The Foundation’s working groups have been developed to provide a vendor-independent governance structure that allows organizations to freely collaborate on the development of new technologies.

“Opto 22’s participation in the Sparkplug working group gives us the opportunity to directly contribute to the development of Sparkplug and to work closely with other vendors who are committed to its success,” said Benson Hougland, vice -President of Opto 22’s product strategy, in a press release. “Given our strong belief in using open source software for industrial applications, we are also delighted to be working with an organization like the Eclipse Foundation on such an important project.

The Eclipse Foundation now manages Sparkplug as part of the Eclipse Tahu project, which includes the Sparkplug specification; a client library implementation of Java, JavaScript, Python, and C; and reference implementations of Sparkplug applications using client libraries.

Those interested in participating in this project can send an email to the Foundation ( [email protected]). Individuals can join the Sparkplug WG mailing list.

posted by John K. Waters at 04/29/2021 at 11:56 a.m.