Litmus Edge: A Sneak Peek Into What's Coming Next

We are thrilled about the upcoming customer release of the Litmus Edge platform, which will introduce new capabilities across all underlying features, delivering a better user experience, expanded industrial connectivity, new integrations, and proven performance upgrades. Here's a sneak peek into some of them.

What's Coming Next

Global search for all tags

A favorite user feature that was removed in an earlier release will now be back in action – with better performance, an improved user experience, and new functionalities driven by customer demand. Litmus Edge users can once again search for tags across all devices and limit their search to specific devices. This feature allows users to search, filter, and sort up to 1 million tags.

New drivers

New industrial connectors have been added to the Litmus Edge platform, expanding the platform's device connectivity features beyond the manufacturing industry.

Siemens S7-1200 and S7-1500 PLCs for Optimized Block Access

Litmus Edge's native driver simplifies the process of accessing optimized blocks in Siemens S7-1200 and S7-1500 PLCs, eliminating the need for complex configurations and manual coding. The driver leverages Litmus Edge's high-performance architecture to minimize latency and maximize data throughput, ensuring real-time response and efficient system operation. By abstracting away the complexities of optimized block access, the driver reduces the risk of coding errors, ensures the integrity of PLC programs, and provides a standardized interface for accessing optimized blocks, making it easier to maintain and modify PLC programs over time.

IEC60870-5-102 Ethernet (Gen1 driver)

Electric utility companies can use the driver to communicate with remote terminal units (RTUs) in substations to collect information on circuit breakers, transformers, and transmission lines. The Oil and Gas industry can use the IEC60870-5-102 Ethernet driver to communicate with programmable logic controllers (PLCs) at wellheads. Water and wastewater companies can use the driver to communicate with SCADA systems.

Emerson FB107 Ethernet driver

The Emerson FB107 Ethernet driver is designed to be a single or multi-run flow computer that provides the ideal measurement solution for natural gas applications. Its features enable various field automation applications even in extreme temperatures and operating conditions. Litmus Edge users can now connect to the FB107 Ethernet with its prebuilt native driver, thus expanding Litmus Edge benefits beyond the manufacturing industry.

Enron Modbus - Serial and Ethernet

Litmus Edge will also include a native driver for Enron Modbus – both serial and Ethernet. Enron Modbus is a powerful protocol that can provide several benefits over standard Modbus. Customers can take advantage of the support for 32-bit registers allowing larger volumes of data transfers in a single transaction, enhanced troubleshooting and trend analysis using event logs and historical data from devices, improved communication reliability while connecting to SCADA systems and other critical production systems.

Multiple enhancements to other drivers

Users will also see several enhancements to the existing drivers in terms of functionality and configuration.

Improved Tag Search Performance

When there are several hundreds of pre-configured tags, searching for those tags involved recursive calls on the front-end making the user interface slow in response. Drivers that support the "browse tags" functionality will benefit from this feature: MTConnect Ethernet (Gen1), BACnet, OPCUA Advanced Driver, ROC, DNP3, and MQTT Server.

With the new Server Search functionality, preconfigured tags can be searched from the backend all at once. Users can easily add those tags to their device.

Custom attributes in Pub/Sub Connector

Users can now add user-defined key/value pair in the Pub/Sub Connector.

Example application - A manufacturer uses Pub/Sub to stream data from its supply chain partners. The manufacturer wants to be able to track the location of its inventory in real time. To do this, Litmus Edge users can use custom attributes to store the GPS coordinates of the inventory in each Pub/Sub message. Their logistics platform can then use these attributes to track the location of the inventory in real time.

Aveva Data Hub Integration

Litmus Edge will enable data integration with Aveva Data Hub.

The upcoming release will include a bidirectional connector between Aveva Data Hub and Litmus Edge, allowing Litmus Edge users to:

• Import tags/topics from DeviceHub

• Support backup and restore

• Use connector logs

• Record connector events as system events, and others

AWS IoT SiteWise Connector

Litmus Edge added a connector to AWS IoT SiteWise to its list of prebuilt northbound integrations. AWS IoT SiteWise users can create asset models in AWS SiteWise. Assets in the plant floor can be deployed with these models. Typically, industrial device data is collected in Litmus Edge tags and the AWS IoT Core is used to map the data to AWS SiteWise. With this new connector, the data can be sent directly as asset tags to AWS SiteWise with no mapping required.

Siemens Insights Hub

The new Siemens Insights Hub is a more powerful and versatile platform than the old Siemens MindSphere cloud. An updated Litmus Edge integration to Siemens MindSphere will be available that will integrate seamlessly with Siemens Insights Hub.

Snowflake Connector

The upcoming release will include a prebuilt connector to Snowflake, a popular cloud-based data warehouse providing a centralized storage for large volumes of industrial data, improve data analytics, prevent critical data losses, and enable seamless data sharing with other applications and users.

Upload Multiple Topics At Once

Currently, users can either import tags from the DeviceHub as integration topics or manually create inbound and outbound topics. However, this is time-consuming for customers with several topics to upload. With this new feature, users can bulk upload topics using a CSV file, similar to how tags are currently uploaded.

Pre-validate Litmus Edge and Litmus Edge Manager connections

Troubleshooting network and system issues is often challenging in a remote setup. For example, firewall rules in a user's network can be quite unique based on organizational, regulatory, or industry-specific needs. Those rules can sometimes block ports or certain protocols, affecting activation and license provisioning of Litmus Edge. Other improvements in firewall port management were also made in the platform that allow users to specify rules for inbound communication or choose a specific port for devices to send data to Litmus Edge.

Benefits - With the new feature, Litmus Edge will automatically validate the connection to Litmus Edge Manager to detect any common errors. If an error is found, user will be presented with the cause and recommendation for fix.

Static Route Configuration

IT teams typically take care of routing messages in networks by configuring those routes at the virtual machine level or network appliance level. These procedures can be cumbersome and time consuming especially when the networks are fairly complex.

Benefits - The static route feature provides a simple UI frontend that allows users to control the routing of messages in a complex network with multiple interfaces and gateways, without having to SSH into Litmus Edge and use Linux commands. This new UI-based feature is easier to use and more accessible, and it also includes an API for external application integration.

Digital Twin Enhancements

In addition to several UX improvements, the digital twin feature will also include enhancements such as:

• Versioning of digital twin models to enable users to update a model when there is an instance of the model at work

• Bulk upload of both static and dynamic data to the data models

• Import and export data hierarchy from the digital twin models

• Integrate digital twin models with popular digital twin frameworks, applications, and platforms

• Support new data types - string, number, Boolean, and array

Security Enhancements

Support Bundles

Support bundles allow customers to share system files and logs with the Litmus support team to facilitate troubleshooting and issue resolution. Litmus protects customer privacy and security when sharing support bundles by ensuring that no sensitive data is exposed.

The new enhancements improve privacy and security for support bundles for Litmus Edge and Litmus Edge Manager. Customers also have the option to specify whether to download a bundle that only includes logs or to also include config files, giving them tighter control over what is shared.

Several other security enhancements will also be included in the upcoming release:

• Displaying the lockout time on the UI

• Granular role-based access control (RBAC) using a secure yet flexible permission scheme for Flows so that more teams and end users can leverage the data without compromising IP

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