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

EMQ, the leader in open source IoT data infrastructure software, announced that Neuron, its industrial protocol gateway software for the IoT edge, will be open sourced under the GNU LGPL starting with the 22 April 2022 release of version 2.0 of Neuron, an industrial protocol gateway software for the IoT edge that supports one-stop access and MQTT protocol conversion for dozens of different communication protocol devices simultaneously!

Neuron is built for industrial IoT connectivity, supporting one-stop access and MQTT protocol conversion for multiple devices with different communication protocols and dozens of industrial protocols at the same time, occupying only ultra-low resources, and can be deployed in various types of edge hardware with X86. ARM, and other architectures in either a native or containerised manner, helping to build industrial IoT platforms and applications.

Neuron's product prototype started in 2018. when the Industrial Internet of Things IIoT was still in its infancy, with the aim of solving the problem of connecting a large number of heterogeneous industrial devices for the data collection requirements of future industrial IoT platforms, and in September 2020. the GA version of Neuron was officially released and has been widely used by customers in various industries.

In September 2020. the GA version of Neuron was officially released and widely used by customers in various industries. Now, in line with EMQ's long-standing open source philosophy and its mission to serve the community and industry with its products, Neuron, which has formally become an open source project, will fully satisfy the needs of users for flexible customisation and development, and will work together with the open source community to broaden the possibilities of the products and the industry and accelerate the development of the Industrial Internet of Things.

Aggregation of IoT data, the key to Industry 4.0 transformation

With the popularity of the concept of Industry 4.0 and the deepening of its practice in the industry, the demand for the transformation of traditional industries and the deployment of industrial IoT is getting stronger and stronger. One of the keys to the success of Industry 4.0 is to empower industrial devices with IoT connectivity.

However, this process is faced with a wide variety of devices, buses and protocols. At the same time, as the architecture combining IT and OT becomes more and more mature, industrial IoT needs to decouple data access, data storage, data consumption and business applications, and the demand for fine-grained modular industrial data collection solutions is becoming more and more obvious in the market.

Neuron is designed to solve these problems.

Neuron provides one-stop access to dozens of industrial protocols and converts them into MQTT protocols, uploading data to the cloud-based industrial IoT platform to realise data collection, remote control, configuration update, and equipment asset management for industrial equipment.

Combined with EMQ's other infrastructure software products at the edge and in the cloud, Neuron has so far provided a complete data collection and processing solution including edge-side device access for industrial Internet, new energy power generation, oil exploration and exploitation and other industry application scenarios.

Neuron 1.x version was initially a closed-source form, with the growth of the user scale, for the development of the driver and northbound docking and other customised needs are increasing. In order to enable more users to develop more flexible protocols and plug-ins based on the high-performance industrial data acquisition access framework, and in line with EMQ's original intention of embracing open source, Neuron will officially become an open source project from version 2.0 onwards, with the source code repository hosted at GitHub (https://github.com/emqx/neuron/releases /tag/2.0.0).

Neuron v2.0 will focus more on the basic capabilities of data collection, aggregation and forwarding of industrial protocols, providing a high-performance data access basic communication framework for industrial IoT platform construction.

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.