M4E #18: What is OPC-UA?
You may have heard about OPC-UA, one of the buzz words in the Industrial IoT world. It stands for OPC Unified Architecture and it’s a communication standard devised to enable interoperability in industrial environments. This really short video from the OPC Foundation summarises the concept in under 2 minutes!
Time for Insights
The OPC term in OPC-UA comes from an older communications standard, but still in use in many factories, that is completely different from this modern technology. The OPC acronym comes from OLE for Process Control (OLE may ring a bell to you from old Windows applications. Yes, it’s that one).
As told, OPC-UA is becoming the de facto standard for Industrial IoT communications. As listed in the video it is vendor independent, thus fostering interoperability. It’s also an open standard, with many variations to consider a variety of use cases and features such as PubSub over MQTT.
There are many open-source libraries implementing the OPC-UA standard or part of it. Here you can find some of them: