Bellows

The Bellows — In Development

The bellows keep the fire alive and direct air where it is needed. Bellows is the OPC UA gateway of the ForgeIEC platform — the standardized interface between workshop and control room, between machine and supervisory system.

Bellows is in active development. The features described here represent the planned scope.

OPC UA — The Industry Standard

OPC Unified Architecture is the vendor-independent standard for machine-to-machine communication in industrial automation. Bellows implements this standard as an integral part of the ForgeIEC platform.

Planned Features

OPC UA Server

• Expose all PLC variables as OPC UA nodes
• Automatic mapping of IEC data types to the OPC UA information model
• Browse, Read, Write, and Subscribe services
• Security through certificate authentication

OPC UA Client

• Access external OPC UA servers from the PLC program
• Read and write remote variables
• Event subscriptions for state-based control

Information Model Mapping

• Automatic generation of the address space from the project configuration
• Support for user-defined information models
• Companion specification compatibility (PackML, Euromap, etc.)

Platform Integration

Bellows will run as an independent bridge process — monitored and managed by anvild. Communication with the PLC core uses Anvil Technology (Zero-Copy Shared Memory), just like the fieldbus bridges.

Forge Studio  --->  anvild  --->  Bellows (OPC UA)  --->  SCADA/MES/Cloud
                      |
                    Anvil SHM

License: AGPL-3.0