Integrations / Connection guides / Kepware KEPServerEX

Kepware KEPServerEX

We integrate seamlessly with Kepware (part of PTC) its main product KEPServerEX. KEPServerEX can be used to connect (mainly over OPC) and control diverse automation devices and software applications.

Kepware IoT Gateway

The Kepware IoT Gateway can be configured to setup agents. These agents can be used to send data from tags configured within Kepware to Blockbax.

Prerequisites

To work with this built-in integration you will need:

1. A Blockbax project
2. KEPServerEX installed

Steps

To setup an agent do the following:

1. Click on “Add Agent” under “IoT Gateway” or click on the “Add new agent button” in the toolbar
2. Type in a Name for the “Agent” and set the “Agent type” to MQTT Client and click on “Next”
3. Configure the MQTT Client Broker
   1. Set the URL to: ssl://mqtt.blockbax.com:8883
   2. Set the topic to v1/projects/<YOUR_PROJECT_ID>/integrations/351d7e1d-e057-4e43-b96d-1d5cc2df9b64/measurements
   3. Configure the rate
4. Click on “Next”
5. Configure the MQTT Client Security
   1. Prefix the Client ID with the public ID of your access token, for example: <YOUR_PUBLIC_ID>-KepwareAgent
   2. Configure the username to the public ID of your access token
   3. Configure the password to the secret of your access token
6. Click on “Finish”

After creating the agent we need to specify the message it should send to Blockbax:

7. Double click on the Agent you have just created
8. The ‘Property Editor’ panel will pop up, in the left side of panel select the ‘Message’ tab
9. Click on the dropdown menu next to ‘Message Format’ and select ‘Advanced Template’
10. Double click on ‘Template’ and substitute the code in the editor with the following code:

{
 "autoCreateSubjects": "true",
 "series" : [
	 {
	    |#each VALUES|
        "ingestionId": "|TAGNAME|",
	    "measurements": [

	        {"date": "|TIMESTAMP|", "number": |VALUE| }

			]} |#unless @last|,|/unless|
		|/each|
	]
}

If done correctly you will successfully have setup an Agent. Within the Agent you can configure items that you want to be read out and send to Blockbax.

11. Go to your Agent
12. Click on “Add IoT items…", or right click in the right window and select “New IoT items”
13. Double click on a Item you want to read out
14. Configure the “Scan rate”
15. Configure the “Publish” setting to either only send on change in data or every scan
16. Click on “Ok”

Repeat step 7 - 12 for every item you want to read out and send to Blockbax. Blockbax maps the item tags to ingestion IDs. You can test if everything works by opening Blockbax and see if the data is coming in.