Hackathon: NOA and HELIO from KEB put to the test
Creating a machine dashboard with HMI and IIoT solutions
HELIO and NOA, the new solutions from KEB Automation for modern HMIs and IIoT, were put through their paces at the Smart Factory OWL. Machine and plant manufacturers had the opportunity to spend a day visualising machine data and controlling machines. And at the end of the workshop, one thing became clear: even without any prior knowledge of HELIO and NOA, it is possible to create a meaningful dashboard for machines and plants within a very short period of time.
Innovation managers, machine operators, developers, service technicians and interested parties from the mechanical and plant engineering sector - they all came to see KEB's latest IIoT solutions for themselves at the hackathon entitled “Industrial APP Marketplace – (Simply) Networking Machines and Systems – Creating Transparency”. NOA, the innovative IIoT and edge platform for recording, visualising and processing data, was put to the test. With NOA, users can create their own automation solutions flexibly and easily on the basis of open systems. The NOA app also includes HELIO – an HMI management system for the platform-independent visualisation of machines and plants. Web-based HMI or SCADA applications can be created quickly and easily with HELIO without any programming knowledge.
At the hackathon, which was organised by owl Maschinenbau in Lemgo and hosted by Fraunhofer IOSB-INA, participants were asked to test NOA and HELIO. The edge devices required for this were provided on site. These included several C6 X1 HMI panels from KEB, iConnectors and Raspberry Pi's. The workshop focussed on various plants that are located in the Smart Factory. The “Smart Warehouse” research demonstrator, for example, illustrates how a high-bay warehouse works. In addition, the “CUNA Production” is a production line for manufacturing plastic drinking cups, including an injection moulding machine, a laser engraving machine and a handling robot.
Workshop delivers positive results
“In the Smart Factory, we wanted to show how easy it is to create a dashboard for machines with our software in a short period of time,” describes Daniel Preuß, Product Owner IIoT Platform at KEB, the goal of the hackathon. Preuß himself instructed the participants on how to establish communication between the machines and the edge devices. This involves reading and writing machine data from the edge devices via the smart factory's OPC UA server. After the instructions, the participants worked on various tasks. For example, the users created a dashboard in HELIO to visualise the position of workpieces in the smart warehouse using sensor data. With NOA, an app was created to read data from several edge devices and make it available in the cloud infrastructure (e.g. building flows and data from vibration sensors). The results were then presented by the participants.
The feedback from KEB after the workshop was extremely positive: “Despite the simplicity that we achieve through intuitive operation and no-code applications, users were able to process complex tasks with our software. These include, for example, vibration analyses in the context of predictive maintenance or condition monitoring. A great result that underlines the benefits of NOA and HELIO in practice for machine and plant manufacturers," says Preuß. The Hackathon participants were also surprised that they were able to demonstrate success in such a short space of time. Many participants had not dealt with no-code solutions in the past, which is why they were convinced by the simplicity of operation. The feedback from the workshop was recorded by KEB in order to derive further requirements for NOA and HELIO. The aim: to further develop both solutions in line with specific customer requirements in order to deliver the best possible results.