We are happy to announce the release of Cybus Connectware 0.35.0. Besides many small fixes and improvements, we are excited to show you some big new features that make data handling within Connectware much more powerful, enables a more consistent configuration and removes the need for additional custom preprocessing tools for most use cases. In the course of our continuous security activities, we have updated most of our internal dependencies. As usual, please refer to the official changelog to get all technical details: https://docs.cybus.io/docs/0.35.0/user/changelog.html

Added MTConnect Adapters as a supported Data Source

Starting with this release, you can directly connect to machines that provide an interface to MTConnect Adapters supporting the SHDR protocol. This is usually the foundation between an MTConnect Adapter and an MTConnect Agent. If available, this is the more performant way compared to working with the HTTP/XML Interface of MTConnect. This is for example useful when working with Mazak PLCs. For more information, see the docs at https://docs.cybus.io/docs/0.35.0/user/protocols/shdr.html

Introducing MQTT Middleware

The Cybus Connectware has always been strong in mapping industrial protocols like Modbus, S7, OPC-UA to a unified MQTT API. Data normalization and other pre-processing steps have until now required external logic, that was often implemented in custom Docker containers or NodeRed Flows. Starting with this version, data pre-processing can be defined directly in the Commissioning File. These stream processing steps are called MQTT Middleware. For starters, we provide Transform and Filter functionality with JSONata, rate-limiting filters like burst-mode and change-of-value and a parser for binary raw data.

Sample use cases for this newly added MQTT Middleware are:

• unit conversion and normalization
• insertion of meta-data
• combination of atomic data points to sophisticated digital twin models
• interface adapters
• simple calculations e.g. for counting, processing times, …
• synchronization of decoupled events into homogenous process images
• reduction of cloud transaction costs by reducing package count through burst mode

For a detailed documentation, refer to https://docs.cybus.io/

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