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.
In this tutorial, we will create a custom ROS 2 Humble package called rosbag2reduct that records incoming ROS 2 topics into MCAP bag files on a Raspberry Pi and automatically uploads those files to a ReductStore instance with metadata labels. We'll walk through setting up ROS 2 Humble on the Pi, interfacing a USB camera using the v4l2_camera driver, deploying a lightweight YOLOv5 (nano) object detection node (using ONNX Runtime) to produce detection metadata, and implementing the rosbag2reduct node to capture data and offload it. We will also cover installing ReductStore on the Pi, configuring replication of labeled data to a central storage on your laptop (using label-based filters via the web console). This end-to-end guide is structured with clear steps, code examples, and configuration snippets to help you build and deploy the system.
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.