MTconnect to machine monitoring?

Support, Troubleshooting, & Help
1

Hi, We are looking to connect a few of our milling machines that use MTConnect and I was wondering what the best way to do that would be. I noticed there is OPCUA support in the connectors but would I use a regular HTTP connector?

The other way I was thinking would be to use Node-red and I think I can use an HTTP request to the tulip machine attributes nodes. Is there an MTconnect node or do I just parse the XML file?
Sorry for all the questions and thanks,

2

Hey Adam.

For machines that use a protocol other than OPC-UA, we recommend that you use a protocol translator like Kepware, which will turn MT-Connect into OPC-UA.

Node-red is also a viable low-cost option. As you mentioned, there is no specific node, you will need to parse the XML. See this article on the topic.

Thanks,

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Hey Adam!

After doing a bit of research, hereā€™s what weā€™ve found about MT-Connect and Node-RED.

Dillonā€™s definitely right here - it doesnā€™t look like thereā€™s a one-stop-shop node for MT-Connect yet. However, polling the server and parsing the result seems like a relatively simple way to get MT-C data into Node-RED.

The tutorial Dillon linked looks like the easiest path forward - it walks through first using an HTTP Request node to get results from the server, then an XMP node to translate the result to JSON. Itā€™s a bit barebones, but should be a good place to start.

You might be able to use a stream decoder node like this one to get around having to make individual requests, but this is going to depend heavily on your source server configuration.

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4

This post is creeping up on a year old, so this is probably old news by now.

If you donā€™t need a lot from the MTConnect side - for example if youā€™re monitoring machine state - then I definitely think Node Red is a viable way to go. MTConnect is HTTP (or HTTPS) with XML content. If you know the shape of the MTConnect service on your particular machine you can poll with the right URL. Itā€™s a little trickier if you need to implement discovery, but if your machine isnā€™t changing software I donā€™t see why you would need to. (Iā€™m not an MTConnect expert but this is how I understand it).

Itā€™s also not that hard to make an MTConnect server in Node Red, which probably could be made to handle report by exception from the machine.

I havenā€™t tried any of this beacuse I donā€™t actually have any MTConnect equipment, but if you did go the Node Red route Iā€™d be curious to know how it went.

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