Skip to main content

Sparkplug Recognized a Leader of Edge Computing

I am delighted today to announce that Sparkplug won an IoT Edge Computing Excellence Award from IoT Evolution! This achievement underscores the growing maturity of the specification and its relevance to the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) market. Congratulations to the committers and contributors of the Sparkplug specification project!

From the announcement: 

This award recognizes the companies emerging as leaders in the growing edge computing space. Companies selected for this award have proven that their products are enabling advanced IoT deployments by offering edge solutions that bring real-time computing, data availability, analytics, AI and machine learning to edge devices.

Edge Nodes play a fundamental role in Sparkplug. Version 3.0 of the specification defines them as any MQTT Client application that manages an MQTT Session and provides the physical or logical gateway functions required to participate in the Sparkplug topic namespace and leverage its payload definitions. Sparkplug Edge Nodes are responsible for any local protocol interface to existing devices such as PLCs, RTUs, Flow Computers, and Sensors. They also take care of any local discrete I/O, and any logical internal process variables (PVs) involved.

The figure below illustrates Sparkplug's architecture.

 

As you can see, Sparklug-enabled devices and software components are completely decoupled from each other. On the other hand, Sparkplug Edge of Network nodes aggregate the traffic relevant to the devices attached to them.

Did you know that IoT Edge Computing Excellence Awards are not new to the IoT and Edge Computing community at Eclipse?  Eclipse ioFog, an industry-leading edge container orchestration platform, won such the award back in 2020.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Eclipse ThreadX: Charting our course for 2025

On November 21, 2023, Microsoft announced that it was contributing Azure RTOS to the Eclipse Foundation, which gave birth to the Eclipse ThreadX project . Since then, the project team and Eclipse Foundation staff have been working tirelessly behind the scenes to transition ThreadX to a true community-driven open source project and ensure its continued certification for safety-critical applications. In this short post, I will review the major milestones of that first year and share what to expect from the team in 2025. ThreadX v6.4.1 On February 28, 2024, the ThreadX project released version 6.4.1 of ThreadX and its companion modules. This release, the first made under the Eclipse Foundation development process, completed the transition of ThreadX to open source. From a technical standpoint, there were no changes from the prior 6.4.0 release. And yet, v6.4.1 represents a significant milestone. The Eclipse Foundation intends to certify ThreadX v6.4.1 for safety-critical applications. Yo...

Eclipse IDE for Embedded Developers Now Runs on the Raspberry Pi!

The Eclipse IDE is the project that started it all for the Eclipse Foundation . From the beginning, Eclipse IDE was meant to run on multiple platforms; it now supports Linux, Mac OS and Microsoft Windows. Since it is written in Java, it also supports multiple processor architectures. However, support for 32-bit architectures has been dropped in version 2018-12. This meant recent versions of the IDE would not run on the Raspberry Pi anymore. The introduction of the Raspberry Pi 4 in June 2019 gave hope to Eclipse on Pi fans. With its 64-bit quad core ARM Cortex-A72, the Pi 4 was a good hardware platform to work with. It became even more attractive in May 2020, with the introduction of the 8Gb variant. The Eclipse community took notice of those developments. Version 2020-09 of Eclipse IDE now ships with experimental support for 64-bit ARM (aarch64) on Linux.  Those developments mean embedded and IoT developers can now work on the Raspberry Pi 4 by installing the plugins provided by ...

2025 Embedded and IoT Developer Survey: 10th Time is the Charm

The 2025 edition of the Eclipse Embedded and IoT developer survey is now underway! Take the survey now – it only takes a few minutes. Your insights and opinions will help shape the future of Embedded and IoT systems. Let's make a difference together! Although our public archives only date back to 2019 , the Eclipse Foundation has been conducting this survey in one form or another since 2015. To my knowledge, it is the only one of its kind managed by an open source community. Your participation in this survey is not just a contribution, but a vital part of the open source community's growth. Moreover, all of our survey reports are made available under the CC BY 4.0 license , meaning that you can freely share and adapt them simply by giving appropriate credit. In other words, your participation in the survey benefits not just commercial interests, but the entire open source community. As usual, the survey will gather precious data on embedded microcontroller architectures, commu...