How to add / configure a Hilscher IO-Link Master

This page describes how to configure and setup a IO-Link master from Hilscher and add it to the platform.

Adding Device in the Akenza platform

Create a hilscher IO-Link master device in the platform first. The device has the model name: NFS-M8-QM-D2-N16. After that, get the MQTT parameters out of it and set the device credentials inside the Node-RED flow in the IO-Link master, how to do this is explained in the next chapters. Adding a Hilscher device in the akenza platform is the same workflow as with all other devices, consult the akenza documentation on how to do it.

Connect a Device

IO-Link master / edge device config

To configure the Hilscher device, navigate to its web server address, either by hostname or by IP. For detailed instruction see the Hilscher manual for the product. In the web browser it will ask for credentials:

Default user is admin, default password is admin.

Applications from Hilscher

On the edge device, install the following apps to use IO-Link as well as the MQTT.

• netFIELD App IO-Link Adapter

• netFIELD App IO-Link Configurator

• Mosquitto MQTT Broker

• Node-RED

These applications can be installed via Hilscher cloud or via docker compose / docker run with the following command and files:

docker-compose --file netfield-io-link-setup.yml up -d
docker-compose --file netfield-io-link-setup.yml down

2KB

netfield-io-link-setup.yml

Open

2KB

docker-run.txt

Open

It's recommended to do it with the hilscher cloud. The explanation how these apps work is not part of the akenza documentation.

Head to Node-RED on the IO-link master: Node-RED is reachable on port 1880, by default the hostname of the device is the mac address, without dashes and a "nt" as prefix, the hostname is also labeled on the device.

Here is an example:

http://nt0001c031ef7c:1880

Upload the following Node-RED flow to the device:

2KB

hilscher_flow.json

Open

There is the "Akenza Flow" inside the Node-RED dashboard which contains the relevant nodes. In all the "Device Topic" nodes, change the tenantID and deviceID to the one you got when you created the device in akenza.

These information can be found in the device details under API-configuration in the akenza platform:

To transmit process values or parameters , the "downlink topics" have to be changed accordingly. There are 2 separate structures, one for the process values and one for the parameters. You can see this on the name of the grouping inside Node-RED. The Node-RED flow will check for it and depending on the data structure, trigger different actions:

Process values:

These are values which are used to control a process or set set some output values. For example the status of a light tower (red, orange, green) would be set with this. The asset ID corresponds to the ID which can be found in the "netFIELD App IO-Link Adapter" app.

The values are usually set in hexadecimal like "00 45".

{
    "data": {{value}},
    "assetID": "sick.com/SLT060-0B010J700/6075938/25C20382"
}

Parameters:

These are the value which are usually configured on the master itself when engineering the solution, however these can still be changed from the akenza platform. For example the trigger distance for a sensor could be changed with parameters. To check which specific index and subindex values are needed, consult the manual.

{
    "data": {{value}},
    "Index" : "60",
    "Subindex": "1",
    "assetID": "baumer.com/O300.DL-GM1J.72N/11199079/103295766_0005"
}

These json structures can be used for example in dashboard controls:

Once the device is setup, it will transmit data to the platform.

It will transmit all IO-Link Sensor data to the akenza platform in a generic way. On the akenza platform, you just need to teach the topics which are transmitted.

This can be done on the device type itself, have a look at this page for more informations:

Custom Device Types

By default, the sensor type, manufacturer and ID are used as topic key. Additionally there are some very basic informations like memory free and CPU usage which are always transmitted by default.