Every value an ICCP link carries is an instance of an object model from IEC 60870-6-802:2014. When two control centers negotiate a bilateral agreement, a large part of the technical work is agreeing, point by point, which of these models and which type variant each point uses — because the type determines exactly what crosses the wire: value… Read More: ICCP Object Models: Indication Points and Control Points »
RabbitMQ is an open source message broker. It sits between the parts of a system that produce data and the parts that consume it, and it moves messages between them. Neither side has to know the other exists. They only need to know the broker. In industrial automation, that role fits a common problem. Plants run a mix… Read More: What Is RabbitMQ? The AMQP Message Broker, Explained »
Once your MQTT deployment matters — because it carries production telemetry, or controls physical equipment, or supports customers who expect uptime — a single broker becomes a liability. If that one broker fails, the entire system stops moving messages. For deployments where this is unacceptable, you need redundancy: multiple brokers configured so that the failure of any single… Read More: MQTT Broker Redundancy and High Availability: Complete Guide »
Modbus and MQTT solve the same problem from opposite ends. Modbus reads and writes numbers in a device. MQTT moves messages between systems. Put them together and you can take a register sitting inside a serial meter and land its value in a cloud database a continent away. But the two don’t connect on their own — they… Read More: Modbus to MQTT: How the Gateway Bridge Works »
MQTT is deliberately unopinionated about what your payloads contain, how you structure your topics, or how devices announce themselves to the network. That flexibility is a big part of why MQTT is popular. It is also the reason MQTT alone is not enough for industrial IoT, where two vendors’ devices need to interoperate on the same broker, where… Read More: What Is Sparkplug B? A Complete Guide to MQTT for… »
If you write Python and you need to move small messages between devices or services, MQTT is usually the right fit. It is a publish/subscribe protocol: a client sends a message to a topic, a broker holds the connections, and every client subscribed to that topic gets a copy. Publishers and subscribers never talk to each other directly.… Read More: Python MQTT: Complete Guide to paho-mqtt 2.x »
On a Modbus serial line, every byte you send is wrapped in a few extra bits before it hits the wire. Those extra bits — the start bit, an optional parity bit, and one or two stop bits — make up the character format. Get them wrong on one device and it won’t talk to the rest of… Read More: Modbus Parity and Character Format »
Device control is where ICCP stops being a data feed and becomes an operational tool — and a liability if misunderstood. Conformance block 5 lets one control center trip breakers, raise taps, and write setpoints in another organization’s network. The protocol wraps that power in the select-before-operate pattern every operations engineer knows from local SCADA, adapted for the… Read More: ICCP Device Control: SBO Select and Operate Explained »
An ICCP link is a standing, months-long connection between two organizations, carrying real-time grid data and — where block 5 is enabled — live control of primary equipment. It crosses an organizational boundary by definition: the other end is somebody else’s network, somebody else’s patching discipline, somebody else’s incident. That makes it one of the most security-relevant connections… Read More: ICCP Security: Hardening TASE.2 Links With IEC 62351 »
A transfer set is the engine of an ICCP link. Data values are what you exchange; data sets group them; but the transfer set decides everything about the actual flow — when reports are sent, what they contain, how bursts are handled, and whether the client must acknowledge. Once transfer sets are enabled, the link runs itself: the… Read More: ICCP Transfer Sets: How TASE.2 Reporting Really Works »