The Bellows — resting
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.
Resting — not in development
bellowsd is currently not being developed. The packageforgeiec-bellows-server stays in the APT repository, without
maintenance. Hearth, which reads the process data
directly from the Anvil bus, is the intended operator interface. The
description below reflects the originally 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.
Originally Planned Scope
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 the Anvil server (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
Licence: AGPL-3.0-or-later
Bellows — Standardized communication for connected manufacturing.