Hi there.
Has anyone out there integrated E10 with emmegi cutting machines? We would like to start pulling data from them into EPICOR. For example MES data to indicate cycles times, operation start / stop times that kind of thing. Would be great to hear from anyone else who has done this.
We planning to get the vendor in to help get up and running, but if anyone has any insights into this, things to watch out for, what works well etc. would be gratefully received.
Thanks,
Steve
Hello Steve,
This is exactly what the IoT package is meant to do.
Well that is where I want to go but for the moment emmegi are not being too helpful. Have you achieved this using the IoT tools?
No, not yet. And MES wouldn’t be our first goal. Our product IS a sensor so we might be working to enhance our product to engage our customers better.
The way to make a non-IoT device IoT capable is to use Azure Sphere. You can buy kits that do the Azure communication and they interface with your device - CNC in this case. Here’s an introductory video.
I have done this in my EDI life though. In the Automotive industry, there was a program called Sequenced Part Delivery. As a car moved through the assembly line, the VIN number was read and broadcast to each supplier on the line. The supplier would then know how far along the vehicle was and in what order. The supplier was tasked to bring the parts required for that vehicle in that order to arrive just-in-time for assembly.
The lessons learned from this was it was important to queue and preserve the messages as they came in. That way, if there was an interruption in your processing (back up, reboot, maintenance), you would not miss any records. But it is also necessary to make sure you didn’t process records twice so some coding and data structures were required to handle that. Also, having the full history gave you the ability to do some time-series analysis. We had to write much of this but the Azure IoT gives you a lot of that.
How does the CNC deliver the information? Serial port? TCP message?
Mark W.
I don’t have anything to offer right now, but we are about to start looking at something similar for some different types of machines so it might be useful to keep in touch. We have a new production cell that needs to start talking to Epicor.
I will be looking at the Azure IoT side to see if we can leverage that. One thing I already know we don’t want to do is flood our own database with machine data just because it’s there and being generated.
I don’t think we are going to go down the IoT route right now, we are still evaluating it, but the emmegi machines do not have any native Iot capability so we would need to develop an interface based on text file output from the machines. For now we think this will be easier to process in Service Connect or DMT but we are looking to Azure also to ensure we have all bases covered. We need to purchase some additional software from the manufacturer to enable us to send data direct to the machines and this is where, for now, I am interested to know if anyone has used this. There must be another EPICOR out there who use emmegi machines surely???