Neuron, the industrial protocol gateway software at the edge, is officially open source

Neuron v2.0

High-performance industrial data access basic communication framework

The new open-source Neuron v2.0 provides developers and users with an open-source, high-performance basic framework for industrial data collection and protocol conversion.

Neuron v2.0 uses the NNG asynchronous I/O framework and a multi-threaded model to implement a lightweight, high-performance message bus. Compared to the v1.0 architecture, Neuron v2.0 not only supports multi-instance processes while maintaining multi-device connectivity, but also has a lower memory footprint and improved CPU multi-core utilisation. At the same time, the framework relies only on native PosixAPI, which is highly compatible and portable, allowing users to adapt to more low-cost hardware and apply to a wider range of usage scenarios.

After the open source, developers can focus on the development of various types of device drivers based on the plug-in extensible underlying framework provided by Neuron for the access of industrial device protocols and bus protocols, and quickly realise the data access of industrial IoT platforms.

In addition, Neuron v2.0 adopts a web interface to achieve visual configuration of the software, and supports various cloud-edge collaborative edge management frameworks (e.g., KubeEdge, OpenYurt, etc.), which enables remote management of Neuron software on the edge from the cloud and improves configuration and management efficiency.

On top of the above open source features, EMQ will also provide commercial module support for Neuron, such as commercial driver plug-ins and management modules, to meet the more professional and in-depth business needs of enterprises.

Neuron v2.0 will be managed separately from v1.x. EMQ will still provide bug fixes and maintenance for the existing commercial version of Neuron v1.x, but will no longer provide feature updates based on the 1.x version.

Open Source Software Enables the Industrial Internet of Things

As an independent open source industrial protocol gateway with complete data collection and forwarding capabilities, based on Neuron v2.0's open source and extensible plug-in architecture, users can not only easily extend the southbound standard or customised drivers, but also interface with various open source software through the northbound application interface to realise industrial big data or edge computing.

This will undoubtedly bring more innovative possibilities for the enterprise industrial Internet platform, which can be widely used in industrial production, municipal water supply and gas supply and other scenarios, to achieve remote monitoring of industrial equipment, automatic detection of energy consumption of the equipment, production line information remote delivery and other intelligent business, to accelerate the digital transformation and upgrading of enterprises.