“Over the next 10 to 20 years, there is a general consensus that the new landscape will be shaped by AI and the Internet of Things. Looking at China, among these Internet giants, Alibaba and Huawei are the first to become competitors in the future. In these two fields, they have their own strengths.” — Ali Cloud Road to the Internet of Things

The seemingly simple three words of the Internet of Things are not so easy to implement. It is not only a problem of hardware and software, but also a problem of communication and convergence of various devices. As the most influential company in China, Alibaba from chip, to embedded system, to the Internet of Things platform, and then to a variety of ET brain and industrial Internet platform, and finally to SaaS accelerator and small program. It took two to three years to preliminarily shape the strategic layout of Alibaba’s future AI+IoT, which was the fastest speed.

I devoted myself to the industrial control industry in 2001, mainly engaged in some automation related projects in steel plants. I am familiar with various PLC, HMI touch screen, various intelligent instruments, board cards, and various configuration software, fieldbus and wireless communication. For a long time, the concept of the Internet of things and industrial automation is confused, feeling that the Internet of things technology is actually a part of industrial automation, or industrial automation extension.

Later, with the continuous development of Internet of Things technology, and the increase of various Internet of Things projects I have been engaged in, such as Internet of Things monitoring for planting greenhouses, remote fishery monitoring, remote garbage and sewage monitoring, and Internet of things monitoring for breeding, which HAS been cooperating with New Hope. In addition to the design of a variety of Internet of things gateway, intelligent terminal, aquaculture integrated collector, water treatment integrated detector and other products.

The concept of the Internet of Things is becoming clearer and clearer in my mind. Especially from around 2016, a variety of large companies at home and abroad began to release their own IoT platforms, such as Microsoft released IoT HUB, Amazon released AWS IoT, Baidu released things access, things analysis and things management platform, Ali also released the most basic IoT platform — IoT Development Suite. In April 2018 in ali cloud MVP in an interview, I said: as the division of labor is more and more fine future, the development of cloud computing is more and more mature, the establishment of the Internet protocol standard and improvement of customer technical ability, the future may be in the final customer, under the unified coordination of different Internet vendors do each part (or soft or hard), common to complete the final project.

Now it seems that the emergence of Internet of Things platforms at home and abroad, especially Ali Cloud IoT platform may be born for this mission.

In fact, the road of Ali Cloud Iot is very clear, giving full play to ali’s years of technical accumulation in the field of big data, allowing a large number of sensors and smart devices to access Ali Cloud iot platform, making full use of ali Cloud concurrent access advantages, and truly realizing the Internet of China, digital China. I can’t remember which ali expert once said: As long as there is big data, Ali will have opportunities.

But I a coming years industrial control people from Internet of practitioners, the cloud superstructure through the Internet, mobile Internet era, the infrastructure is already very stable, but the equipment, hardware, all kinds of devices, sensors, access to most industry did not like the propaganda to have fully ready, It’s not necessarily suitable for large-scale, fast access at the moment. Therefore, it is expected that in the next one to two years, Alibaba’s road to the Internet of Things may not be as fast as it started, but it will be the only way for the future development of the Internet of things, and also the foundation of China’s “Industry 4.0”, intelligent manufacturing in the future.

More than 10 years ago, there was a tide similar to the Internet of things, that is, serial port to network port, a lot of serial port equipment in the factory through the serial port to network port equipment, and then through the Ethernet access to the central control room, the second wave in the following years is actually with the development of mobile Internet, DTU ( Data Transfer Unit (DTU) is a wireless terminal device that converts serial port Data to IP Data or converts IP Data to serial port Data for transmission through wireless communication network.

With the explosion of the Internet of Things, in addition to various sensors, DTU equipment has also been greatly developed. However, compared with the past, the background of The Times has changed. Before, DTU equipment was only a transparent transmission channel, and the server was mostly realized by integrated manufacturers themselves. However, now that various Internet of Things platforms have emerged, DTU as a transparent transmission can no longer meet the current requirements, not only requiring protocol to upload data, but also supporting a variety of platform functions, such as events, such as services, such as remote parameters, such as remote upgrade and so on.

Therefore, in this era, in order to adapt to the current market, many companies that provide DTU similar products adopt the following two methods: first, DTU is embedded with Modbus and MQTT protocols, and some devices that support Modbus protocol are connected through configuration, and then specific Internet of Things platform is connected through MQTT. Second, DTU still maintains transparent transmission, upload to DTU manufacturer’s own cloud platform, then conduct protocol analysis, and let customers access device data through API interface.

In fact, the two modes have their own advantages and disadvantages. The first method can adapt to some relatively simple cloud scenarios, but the site is more complex, and it is relatively difficult for some devices requiring cascading or non-Modbus and other non-standard protocols to access the network. The second cloud platform relies on vendors, which is a test of data security and communication stability.

As I experienced the DOS to Windows platform migration, custom server to cloud platform migration. I am convinced that the future construction of Internet of Things system, Internet of Things platform is unavoidable, because the Internet of Things platform is not only data transmission, but also big data collection, analysis, and even AI artificial intelligence. Therefore, at the very beginning, the gateway device we designed was not DTU. Firstly, it was designed to access various devices through configuration, not only various protocols, but also various Internet of Things link interfaces. In addition, it was born to support various Internet of Things platforms.

 

YF3300 series has two features, one is configuration architecture, and the other is natural connection to IoT cloud platform, especially Ali Cloud IoT platform, which supports most common features of the platform. The following will be introduced through a series of articles ali Cloud IoT+YF3300 collision out of a variety of sparks.

[Ali Cloud IoT+YF3300] 1: Current situation and future of Ali Cloud IoT in the context of The Times

[Ali Cloud IoT+YF3300] 2: Introduction to Alink protocol of Ali Cloud IoT Cloud communication

[Ali Cloud IoT+YF3300] 3: Upload and deliver properties of Alink model

[Ali Cloud IoT+YF3300] 4: Event trigger of Alink object model

[Ali Cloud IoT+YF3300] 5: Service delivery of Alink model

[Ali Cloud IoT+YF3300] 6: Alarm configuration of IoT devices

7: Expression calculation of Internet of Things devices

[Ali Cloud IoT+YF3300] 8: User script development of Internet of Things devices

9: Rapid development of Modbus device drivers

[Ali Cloud IoT+YF3300] 10: Rapid development of 188 protocol device drivers

[Ali Cloud IoT+YF3300] 11: Fast communication cascade of multiple devices in Internet of Things

Ali Cloud IoT+YF3300 12: Introduction to Ali Cloud IoT Studio

[Ali Cloud IoT+YF3300] 13: Ali Cloud IoT Studio WEB monitoring interface construction

14: Alibaba Cloud IoT+YF3300 creates mobile APP

[Ali Cloud IoT+YF3300] 15: Ali Cloud Internet of Things small program construction

[Ali Cloud IoT+YF3300] 16: Cloud integration, examples show the construction of Internet of Things projects