Mettler Toledo Balance Integration

Support, Troubleshooting, & Help
, ,
1

Hey All,

Has anyone tired integrating a standalone Mettler Toledo balance with Tulip? I am trying to figure out what it will take to pull [Mettler Toledo XS205] data into Tulip?(Balance XPR205 - Overview - METTLER TOLEDO)

Any help/guidance will be greatly appreciated!

2

Hey Petrus! I believe I found an online manual here.

Do you have a cable to connect your computer’s USB to the RS232 serial port in the back of the balance? This will be the easiest way to integrate.

1 Like
3

Mettler use SICS protocol based on TCP connection. We can build a custom flow in Node-Red to read and write value in our scale and connected to Tulip Machine API, just with a Edge MC Gateway. Depending of your existing architecture and number of scales, you can build a custom OPC UA driver, for example. Finally Mettler provide ACI400 gateway to transform SICS protocol in MQTT or OPC UA.

1 Like
4

@dan.pomeranz and @youri.regnaud thank you very much for your feedback. I summarized the steps below, please let me know if I missed anything.

I am not sure what effort it will take to build a customer driver, but assume it is not worth it for our current scope (~ 5 balances). With this in mind, option 2 seems like the path of least resistance and also provide the potential for other systems to use the data (vs. Option 2). Any thoughts?

Option 1:

  1. Connect ACI400 to MT scale via RS232
  2. Connect ACI400 to the network via ethernet to get data into OPC UA server
  3. Connect to the OPC UA server from Tulip using an OPC UA connector

Option 2:

  1. Connect Tulip Edge MC Gateway to MT scale via RS232
  2. Build a custom flow in Node-Red to read and write value from/to the scale
  3. Connect Note-Red to Tulip Machine API to bring data into the app

Option 3:

  1. Build customer driver for MT scale to connect to OPC UA
  2. Connect to the OPC UA server from Tulip using an OPC UA connector
5

@petrus_geldenhuis, is there a reason you need to connect the balance as a machine? Using RS232 you would be able to connect the balance directly to a Tulip app and fire triggers based on the serial messages. This is how our Weigh and Dispense library app was built with a Mettler Toledo Scale.

Shoot me an email and I can walk you through this: dan.pomeranz@tulip.co

6

For 5 machines, option 2 will be my choice. Learn to build « Node-RED » protocol translation is always a good things in 4.0 journey.

1 Like
7

Can’t echo what @youri.regnaud had to say more - Node-RED is sweet.

A little more color if you want to go down that road-

Last week we revamped some of the documentation around Node-RED to make this sort of usecase even easier. I’d highly recommend the videos below if you want to go down that road:

Node-RED + Tulip Explainer
Arduino to Node-RED thru Serial

Another video with a deep dive on NR and Serial is in edit right now and should be out by the end of the week.

There are also a number of awesome Knowledge Base article around this.

NR + Edge IO
How to user Serial with Node Red
Serial with EdgeMC
Serial with EdgeIO

Hope this helps,
Pete

8

Yes. it works great. Follow @Grant 's article on “Using the mt seven excellence driver” and connect using a USB printer port cable. To my experience all the “X” level Mt equipment works using this.