2 posts tagged with "industrial-protocols"

EtherNet/IP is everywhere in North American manufacturing — from plastics auxiliary equipment to automotive assembly lines. But the protocol's layered architecture confuses even experienced controls engineers. What's the actual difference between implicit and explicit messaging? When should you use connected vs unconnected messaging? And how does CIP fit into all of it?

This guide breaks down EtherNet/IP from the wire up, with practical configuration considerations drawn from years of connecting real industrial equipment to cloud analytics platforms.

Every manufacturing plant is a polyglot. Modbus RTU on the serial bus. Modbus TCP on the local network. EtherNet/IP talking to Allen-Bradley PLCs. And now someone wants all of that data in the cloud via MQTT.

Protocol bridging at the edge is the unglamorous but critical work that makes IIoT actually function. Get it right, and you have a seamless data pipeline from a 20-year-old Modbus RTU device to a modern cloud analytics platform. Get it wrong, and you have data gaps, crashed connections, and a plant floor that's lost trust in your "smart factory" initiative.

This guide covers the architecture, pitfalls, and hard-won lessons from building protocol bridges that run in production — not just in proof-of-concepts.