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What is OPC-UA?
OPC-UA (Unified Architecture) is an open standard that specifies information exchange for industrial communication, particularly on devices within machines, between machines and from machines to systems in a convergence of informational technology (IT) and operational technology (OT).
It is compatible with any platform: windows, linux, mac, android, etc. and can be used with minimal embedded controllers to massive cloud infrastructure, even mobile devices. It is suitable for a closed network or for being used over the internet – but has security at it’s core meaning authentication, encryption and access control are all baked into this protocol.
OPC-UA has been widely adopted in many industries such as automotive, food & beverage, oil & gas, energy & utility, packaging, building automation and more.
Industry 4.0 requirements for OPC-UA:
Vendor Agnostic 
Scalable
Secure
Information Modeling
Discovery
Semantic Data
Standardised
What's the difference between OPC-DA and OPC-UA?
OPC-DA comes under the OPC Classic model. OPC Classic uses DCOM communication for Client-Server connection. DCOM is for Windows OS. And, DCOM and RPC ports aren’t as engineer-friendly.
For this reason, OPC-UA does not rely on DCOM communication and is operating system (OS) agnostic. As well as this OPC-UA has many more attributes/properties that can be shared between client and server.
OPC-DA, is an older version of OPC specification. The only information which was transferred between server and client was VQT (Value Quality and Time).
OPC-UA to MQTT adapter
The ability to take OPC-UA messages and transcribe them to MQTT is extremely useful because typically, these two communications protocols will not communicate with each other. OPC-UA will gather concepts from data: objects, type, device, value, etc. MQTT on the other hand is preferred by developers due to its ease of use, speed and user-friendliness.
For this reason MQTT is a standard protocol for our solutions, which is why we have created these easy protocol adapters for OPC-UA, BACnet and more.
To learn more and understand how our solution can fit into your system. Please get in touch with our team.
If you have any suggestions for improvements please tell us – Contact Us