As modern manufacturing becomes increasingly data-driven, the need for efficient data acquisition systems is more critical than ever. In my previous article, Building a Data Acquisition System for Manufacturing, we discussed the challenges of data acquisition in manufacturing and how ReductStore can help solve them. Here we will learn how to use ReductStore at the edge of the shop floor and stream data to the cloud.
Large manufacturing plants generate vast amounts of data from machines and sensors. This data is valuable for monitoring machine health, predicting failures, and optimizing production. It also serves as a foundation for building industrial AI models for predictive maintenance, quality control, and process optimization.
A Data Acquisition (DAQ) system collects this data, processes it, and stores it for further analysis. It typically consists of edge devices that gather real-time data, central servers or cloud storage for retention, and software that enables analytics and AI-driven insights.
An example of a 3 tier DAQ system based on ReductStore.
Traditional automation solutions like SCADA and historians are complex, expensive, and not optimized for modern cloud-based AI applications. They often limit access to data, making it difficult for engineers and data scientists to develop machine learning models and gain actionable insights.
In this article, we’ll explore the challenges of building a modern DAQ system for manufacturing and how ReductStore can simplify the process and support ELT (Extract, Load, Transform) workflows for advanced analytics and AI applications.
The MQTT protocol is widely used in IoT applications because of its simplicity and ability to connect different data sources to applications using a publish/subscribe model. While many MQTT brokers support persistent sessions and can store message history while an MQTT client is unavailable, there may be cases where data needs to be stored for a longer period of time. In such cases it is recommended to use a time series database. There are many options available, but if you need to store unstructured data such as images, sensor data or Protobuf messages, you should consider using ReductStore as a MQTT database. It is a time series database specifically designed to store large amounts of unstructured data, optimised for IoT and edge computing.
ReductStore provides client SDKs for many programming languages to integrate it into your infrastructure. For this example, we will use the JavaScript client SDK.
Let's build a simple application to understand how to keep a history of MQTT messages using ReductStore and Node.js.