Blog
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How to Access Optimized Data Blocks in TIA Portal (S7-1200/1500)
When working with Siemens S7-1200 and S7-1500 PLCs, you’ll notice that TIA Portal creates optimized data blocks by default. Unlike the classic S7-300/400 controllers, optimized blocks do not use fixed memory offsets. Instead, the PLC compiler reorganizes the data internally for better performance and memory efficiency. This architectural change often creates confusion when trying to read PLC data from external systems.
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How to Optimize Industrial Data Communication with Protocol Buffers
You're generating terabytes of sensor data every day. Most of it is waste, I mean.. Not the measurements—those are fine. It's... -
How to Protect Your Factory From Bad Data: A Must-Have Read for IIoT
Bad data quietly corrupts production analytics, triggers false equipment alarms, and causes automation systems to make faulty control decisions. Unlike... -
Store-and-Forward at the Edge: Buffering Production Data During Network Outages
Network outages happen. A fiber cut, a switch failure, or infrastructure maintenance can take your connectivity offline without warning. When... -
FlowFuse 2.24: FlowFuse Expert in the Node-RED Editor, Scheduled Updates, Simpler Edge Device Addition, Store and Forward Blueprint, and what's next!
This release unlocks several new abilities for our users, speeding your development time, easing management of Node-RED instances, providing a... -
Building a Web HMI for Factory Equipment Control
Most factory HMIs are still stuck in one place. Dedicated panels mounted next to equipment, or SCADA workstations in the... -
FlowFuse + LLM + MCP = Text Driven Operations
In industrial operations it's all about getting more out of the CAPEX already spent. Achieving higher efficiency means everyone needs to... -
Building a Label Scanner with FlowFuse for Product Labels & Serial Numbers
In production environments, labels are everywhere! Products have Serial Numbers and Lot Codes, Packages have Batch IDs and Dates. These... -
How to Ingest CSV Logs into MQTT, Databases, and Dashboards
If you work in manufacturing, you likely have gigabytes of data in CSV files—temperature logs, production counts, machine status records.... -
The Industrial IoT Market Shift: What the PTC Divestment Means for Your Data Strategy
The news of PTC selling Kepware and ThingWorx to TPG for $600 million has caused a significant impact across the... -
How to Connect Any PLC to MQTT in Under an Hour
Getting PLC data into systems where it can be monitored, analyzed, and acted upon is essential for modern manufacturing. MQTT... -
FlowFuse 2.23: MCP and ONNX nodes, FlowFuse AI Expert on the homepage, Application-level Permission Control, FlowFuse Expert for Self-Hosted, and more!
In this exciting release, we've shipped several features that accelerate development in Node-RED using AI, enable creation of AI agents... -
How to Log PLC Data to CSV Files
CSV files have been recording manufacturing data since the mid-1980s, over 40 years of continuous use across every industry. Logging... -
Introducing FlowFuse Expert
We've had an exciting week launching MCP and ONNX nodes, and now we’ve added something else we're really excited about:... -
Building MCP Servers for AI Agent Integration in Node-RED with FlowFuse
FlowFuse released MCP nodes for Node-RED, allowing AI to directly interact with the flows you have built. These nodes let... -
MCP and Custom AI Models on FlowFuse!
We have a VERY exciting announcement today: you can now build an MCP server and upload custom-trained AI models to... -
EtherNet/IP Integration with FlowFuse: Communicating with Allen-Bradley PLCs
EtherNet/IP is one of the most widely used industrial communication protocols for connecting PLCs, sensors, and controllers across manufacturing environments.... -
Deploy Custom-Trained AI Models: Using ONNX with Node-RED and FlowFuse
FlowFuse is introducing a new set of AI nodes to make it easier than ever to integrate AI and machine... -
Beyond Cloud AI Orchestration: Why the Future is Hybrid Edge-Cloud Intelligence
Congratulations to n8n on their Series C funding round! This is a fantastic milestone and a clear signal that the...
