I am proud to announce the release of the Next Generation OPC UA IIoT Wall. This document will provide the steps to ensure a successful rollout. I'd like to thank Ranga Vadlamudi, from the IoT Central team for his late night and weekend support. I'd like to thank Hans Gschoßmann for his insights to the OPC UA integration. A final thank you to Ali Mazaheri and Chad Gronbach for their time and leadership while I struggled to rebuild the OPC UA wall into an impactful demo and showcase for our customers.

Please Note: The OPC UA Wall is an evolving solution and will continue to be improved through the coming weeks and months. I'll be posting a list of roadmap features and showcases that you can leverage for your customer events. If you would like to assist, I'm looking for volunteers. Reach out to me directly.

Kevin Orbaker

The HP gateway installed on the OPC wall must be installed/upgraded with the latest version of Windows 10 Enterprise (currently this is build 21H2). It is best if you do a clean installation of Windows 10. Storage on the HP gateway is limited. Do not install any unnecessary software. Please make sure all updates are completed prior to proceeding with the installation. After all Windows Updates are applied, run Disk Cleanup on the C: drive (include system files) to free up space.

This is a critical step as it must be done prior to the next steps. The HP Gateway comes with two ethernet ports. Both ports are connected to the same switch, and by default, they both grab an IP Address from whatever DHCP server your wall is connected to. We need to assign a static IP address to one of the ports to ensure it can communicate with the devices that are plugged into the IoT Wall.

From Windows, press Windows + R. From the Run dialog enter control panel and click OK

• From Control Panel select Network and Internet and then select Network and Sharing Center.
• From there you should see two ethernet connections. Names for these might vary (mine was labeled Ethernet and Ethernet 3). Choose one of the connections and select it.
• From the Ethernet x Status Dialog, click Properties
• From the Properties Dialog, click Internet Protocol Version 4(TCP/IPv4) and click Properties
• From the Internet Protocol Version 4 dialog, click Use the following IP address: and enter the following:
  • IP address: 192.168.30.10
  • Subnet mask: 255.255.255.0

Note: Leave all other values blank.

• Click OK then Close

You will need to install the Windows Subsystem for Linux v2 (WSL2) by following the steps outlined from here. The default installation uses Ubuntu. Do not change the default Linux Distribution as Ubuntu is the only Distro that has been tested.

Now, install Docker Desktop from here. Please note that Docker Desktop should be configured using its WSL2 engine and it should be automatically started when you log in (check the Settings page of the Docker Desktop app running in the System Tray).

The OPC UA IIoT Wall is hosted on IoT Central in the EXP tenant. To onboard your wall, you will need to do the following.

• Login to the OPC UA IIoT Wall portal with your Manager, Product Development - Engineering persona. For example: In Irvine, it is Aamil Shammas. Find the Persona for your Location here

• Select your location from the list.

• From the Device screen, select Connect in the upper left corner of the display. You will need the ID Scope, Device ID and Primary Key, to onboard your Wall during the IoT Edge runtime installation in the next step.

• Now, install the IoT Edge runtime using the IoT Edge Installer from here. No not run the IoT Edge Installer directly from the Web. You will need to download the installer, then run it with Administrator privileges.

• Select Use Docker Desktop and Configure IoT Edge for Azure IoT Central (SaaS). Provide ID Scope, Device ID and Primary Key from the previous step. Click install.

The installer will make sure all prerequisites are installed, and you may have to reboot and rerun the IoT Edge Installer should a prerequisite need to be installed first. Eventually, the IoT Edge Installer will complete with "This part of the installation is now complete". After a while, the Edge Agent, Edge Hub, and Node-RED Docker modules will be running on the gateway and can be monitored in the Docker Desktop app running in the System Tray.

Before proceeding to the final step, please wait until the Node-RED service is deployed to the wall.

The final step is to deploy the Node-RED Flow for the Beckhoff Controller. This process will capture and report the Telemetry from the Beckhoff sensors and services (Temperature, Fan Speed, and Lamp Status) as well as process commands from IoT Central (Enable/Disable the Lamp, Set the Fan Speed from 0-32,000 RPM)

• From Microsoft Edge on the HP gateway, navigate to http://localhost:1880

You will be promted to login to Node-RED. Please see the IoT Teams Channel for this information. At this point you might be promoted to Create Project. Click Not right now

• In the upper right-hand corner of the Node-RED canvas there is a hamburger menu option (three lines).
• Click on the hamburger menu and select Manage Palette
  • Click on the Install tab
  • Search for node-red-contrib-opcua
  • Click Install, and then click Install from the pop-up
  • Once complete click Close

This should take less than 1 minute to complete. You will see a pop-up window with the list of nodes that were installed.

• Click on the hamburger menu and select Import
• From the Import nodes window
  • Select Clipboard and copy and paste the following JSON into the text area in the window and click Import

At this point you might be prompted for another action. If so, click Import copy

You should see three tabs across the top of the Node-RED canvas. Before you continue with the deployment, you will need to delete the two tabs that were created when Node-RED was initialized for the first time. The two tabs are labeled Azure IoT Edge and Dashboard.

• Double-click on the Azure IoT Edge tab
• From the pop-out window, click Delete
• Repeat the previous two steps for the Dashboard tab
• Finally, click Deploy in the upper right-hand corner of the canvas.

Your OPC UA IIoT wall has been deployed and is ready for use. You should see Beckhoff Telemetry being sent to your wall.

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