# Product Overview
# What is Neuron?
Neuron provides extensive and diverse driver support for various industries. It can simultaneously connect to devices with multiple different driver protocols for data acquisition and control, enabling interconnection between industrial IoT platforms and various devices, and ultimately providing data support for data-centric automation and intelligent manufacturing.
Neuron is a lightweight industrial protocol gateway software based on the LGPL license open source, which can add new driver or application support to Neuron through extension plugins. Its aim is to solve the problem of difficult unified access to device data in the context of Industry 4.0.
# What is NeuronEX?
NeuronEX is a version of the Neuron integrated data stream processing engine eKuiper. With the NeuronEX UI, it is easy to create data streams and perform other stream processing operations.
# Product Functions and Features
# Diversified Connectivity
Neuron provides diversified driver protocol support for various industries, including building automation, CNC machines, Robotics, Electricity, various PLCs, and even intelligent sensors, such as Modbus, OPCUA, Ethernet/IP, IEC104, BACnet, Siemens, Mitsubishi, and more.
Neuron supports applications that connect to various cloud or IIoT platforms, such as MQTT, WebSocket, SparkPlug B, and other custom applications.
With MQTT, IIoT platforms, big data, and AI/ML analysis software can be better integrated into private clouds, EMQX Cloud, AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, or local servers.
Through SparkPlug B, unified data operations will be provided for industrial applications, eliminating the complexity of ERP, MES, SCADA, and historian accessing device data.
# Lightweight
Neuron is developed entirely in C language and supports running on devices with hardware architectures such as X86, ARM, MIPS, RISC-V, as well as containerized deployments such as K8s, KubeEdge, and more. Neuron can achieve data acquisition at the level of 100 milliseconds or even 10 milliseconds on devices with limited hardware resources, and on servers with sufficient hardware resources, Neuron can fully utilize multi-core CPUs to simultaneously collect data from hundreds of thousands of data points at a frequency of 100 milliseconds and perform point writing control.
# Stream Processing
NeuronEX integrates the stream SQL processing rule engine eKuiper, which enables edge-side AI/ML analysis and control logic on the collected industrial data. It can also store the filtered industrial data in local time-series databases or quickly implement rule-based device control.
# Web-based Dashboard
Neuron provides users with a simple and easy-to-use web-based user interface that allows users to manage device connections, view real-time device data, and perform control operations on devices through a browser on any device. Users can also monitor devices in real-time to check whether devices are online and whether data points are abnormal.
# Multi-source Aggregation
Neuron can simultaneously establish 1,000 or more connections with various industrial devices. It collects all the data from these connections and forwards it to the specified MQTT message broker based on user-defined configurations. In other words, by specifying an MQTT broker, Neuron provides a single entry point for data consumers to access all information, simplifying the process for IIoT platforms or industrial applications to retrieve data from various sources, such as a unified namespace architecture.
# API Services
Neuron provides HTTP-API and MQTT-API services, allowing users to operate Neuron and industrial devices remotely. This enables cloud and local IIoT platforms to send commands to connected machines/devices, change their parameter settings based on big data analysis results, or modify data label configurations to adapt to more machines/devices, without the need for on-site operations.
# Data Security
Neuron supports TLS/SSL encrypted data to ensure data security during transmission.
# Device Monitoring
Neuron provides monitoring API that conform to the Prometheus specification, which can provide real-time monitoring data on device connection and operation status. Neuron can also be integrated into the Prometheus monitoring system, and alert notifications can be promptly sent when devices experience exceptions based on predefined alert rules.
# Driver Applications Modularization
Neuron is designed to facilitate the extension of southbound drivers and northbound applications. Based on the core framework of Neuron, users can easily customize and develop southbound and northbound plugins according to their needs.
# Data Tags Optimization
Neuron automatically optimizes the read and write of configured data points to improve data transmission and efficiency. This tag adjustment and reduction mechanism can reduce the workload on networks and devices.
# Product Value
In fields such as industrial automation, IoT, and energy management, large amounts of data need to be collected, processed, and analyzed. However, different devices use different communication protocols, making it difficult to implement functions such as data collection, monitoring, and control. To solve this problem, Neuron can connect to multiple devices using different protocols, collect data from multiple devices in real-time, and upload data to the cloud in real-time. Neuron realizes the interconnection between the industrial IoT platform and various devices.
In addition to real-time data collection, monitoring, and device control, Neuron combined with the data stream processing engine eKuiper can also perform data processing, analysis, and storage. Neuron has the following advantages:
# Solution
Neuron is an industrial IoT connection solution that can meet the requirements of multiple data collection and operation use cases for both discrete and process manufacturers.
# Improve Data Processing Efficiency
In industrial data collection, different devices use different communication protocols, so protocol conversion is often required during data collection. Neuron can collect data from devices using different protocols and upload the data to various cloud or IIoT platform applications via MQTT. The use of Neuron eliminates the tedious operations during data collection and processing, improving data processing efficiency and accuracy.
# Reduce System Integration Complexity
In fields such as industrial automation, multiple devices and systems need to be integrated to achieve functions such as data collection, monitoring, and control. Due to different devices and systems using different communication protocols, complex protocol conversion is often required during system integration. Neuron can run on different hardware architectures such as X86 and ARM and can achieve data collection at the level of 100 milliseconds or even 10 milliseconds on limited hardware resources. The use of Neuron reduces the cost and difficulty of system integration, improving the efficiency and reliability of system integration.
# Data Storage
Combined with the use of the data stream processing engine eKuiper, Neuron can store data in the InfluxDB database. The data can be used for analysis and processing.