OPC-UA is a platform-independent M2M communication protocol for industrial automation. Azure provides sample tools for IoT solutions to get data from an OPC-UA Server into the cloud using Azure IoT Edge.
In this article, I will show a quick introduction to how to use Azure IoT applications in your solution.
A device can expose its values or functionality as an OPC Server and any client can connect it to read values or use its functionality. As an example, we will have multiple OPC-UA Servers running in our imaginary factory and whenever we add a new device (aka OPC-UA Server) into the solution, it will be we can send command to our edge device from cloud to tell what data we are interested in from this OPC-UA Server.
Setting up test environment
In order to create our environment, I will be using a simple python based OPC-UA Simulator. It can be downloaded from this link. In order to run this simulator, please make sure opcua module is installed as command below.
$pip install opcua
$python opcClient.py
When you start this server, you can connect it with a simple OPC-UA Client. I prefer to use Prosys OPC-UA Client.
