Challenge 3: Deploy Industrial IoT solution

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Introduction

Now that Contoso has a device installed in their plant and cloud services deployed to interact with the Edge device; we will need to deploy services onto the Edge device allowing communication via OPC from the simulated Plant-floor ‘machine’ in Challenge-2 to the Edge. This challenge involves deploying specialized modules to the Edge to facilitate the communication with a configuration that will connect and ingest OPC data changes from the Programmable Logic Controller running the ‘machine’ and push them into the cloud for later analysis.

Description

In the previous challenges you should have already build the foundation for proceeding forward with ingesting data from the Plant-floor ‘machine’ we’re simulating. In this challenge we need to focus on deploying the necessary components required to connect to the plant-floor machine’s industrial programmable logic controller (simulated) to the Edge device.

For this challenge you should focus on the steps below to successfully establish data flow from the IoT Edge –> Cloud.

1. Creation of an IoT Edge device on a VNET in Azure HINT: Linux VM Strongly recommended as IoT Edge was designed/built on Linux; but Windows would work if desired.
2. Configuration of IoT Edge Runtime to communicate with Azure HINT: This should be done in an automated fashion – learning resources below.
3. Configuration of OPC module(s) as per documentation HINT: This requires customization to the deployment/modules running on the Edge.
   • Documentation on OPC Publisher Module – challenging to locate
   • https://github.com/Azure/Industrial-IoT/blob/main/docs/modules/publisher-commandline.md
   • https://github.com/azure/iot-edge-opc-publisher

Success Criteria

• Communication flowing, in a secure manner, from the Plant-floor to Azure via an Edge device using OPC modules
• Demonstrate how to view logs of running modules on the hub and see the current status from the portal.
• Demonstration of adding tags, adjust polling intervals and define the names for published values to IoT hub.
• Walk-through of the OPC module(s) and what they are used for.
• Explanation from the team on what protocol was choose to communicate to IoT hub and what ports at the Contoso’s plants would need to be opened

Learning Resources

• IoT Edge Automated Module Deployments
• IoT Edge Runtime components
• Azure Industrial IoT

Advanced Challenges (Optional)

Think about how you can better manage many IoT Edge devices in lieu of going to a singular device one by one in the portal. IoT Hub supports features to deploy at scale – consider exploring this as a pathway to facilitate deploying the IoT modules needed to support this challenge to your IoT Edge device.