Show Notes
This episode is brought to you by Canary Labs, and Cirrus Link Solutions.
Canary Labs - The industrial historian platform that captures your plant and process data the moment it is generated and makes it instantly accessible across your entire operation. Learn more: https://unpluggediiot.com/go/canary-labs
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Node-RED is running in factories, renewable energy systems and smart buildings all over the world. Most of the industry has no idea who built the protocol packages that made it production-worthy.
Klaus Landsdorf, CEO of Iniationware and creator of PLUS for Node-RED (P4NR), joins Phil Seboa and Ed Fuentes for ten years of industrial Node-RED contribution. He first looked at Node-RED in 2015 as a favour to Schneider Electric France, found that queued Modbus messages fired as fast as the runtime could send them, and rebuilt the package from scratch so it could be trusted on a factory floor. Ten years and a thousand-plus commits later it is one of a small number of Node-RED packages carrying a certified designation, and nothing ships below 92% code coverage.
Topics covered: - Rebuilding Modbus for real industrial timing, and the quality gate that followed - OPC UA built as an educational package rather than an abstraction - ISA-95 as a 30-year framework that already describes unified namespace and edge computing - The GPL v3 model behind P4NR, public three-tier pricing, and funding node-opcua - Node-RED next to n8n, and why versions 1 and 2 did not belong in production - BACnet, Modbus TLS, and the security requests coming from industry - Why digitisation keeps growing while efficiency does not - AI in Node-RED development: giving back the 80% that was always boilerplate
Guest: - Klaus Landsdorf - CEO and co-founder, Iniationware; creator of PLUS for Node-RED (P4NR)
Resources: - PLUS for Node-RED: https://plus4nodered.com/ - P4NR community: https://p4nr.com/ - Iniationware: https://www.iniationware.eu/
Episode page: https://unpluggediiot.com/episodes/ep-61-open-source-industrial-scale-node-red-iiot-with-klaus-landsdorf
Chapters: 00:00 Introduction 01:32 Meet Klaus Landsdorf - Iniationware and P4NR 03:08 ISA-95: the 30-year framework most teams skip 06:04 Discovering Node-RED - the Schneider Electric Modbus ask (2015) 07:27 Rebuilding Modbus for real industrial timing 09:35 Why flow-based programming won him over 11:05 2016-17: "you cannot stop" - and the message from Brazil 13:23 IT or OT? Node-RED as the bridge, and the v1/v2 problem 15:58 Node-RED next to n8n: where each one belongs 17:04 Protocol reality: Modbus, OPC UA and the SDK ecosystem 19:39 A certified package, and how many nodes is too many 21:55 What makes these nodes different: the 92% coverage gate 24:18 Modbus at 47 years, and renewable energy 25:10 Open source or commercial: GPL v3 and the P4NR model 26:26 Sharing the cost: funding node-opcua, three-tier pricing 28:29 AI and Node-RED: what the models already know 30:43 Hype cycles and what actually gets built 33:07 BACnet, Modbus TLS, and what industry keeps asking for 34:57 Buzzwords against ISA-95: unified namespace and edge computing 40:34 Digitisation against efficiency: process beats tooling 42:09 AI giving back the 80%: quality and testing 43:57 Closing - where to find Klaus and P4NR
--- Cirrus Link Solutions - MQTT and Sparkplug software that connects OT to IT and cloud systems. Visit: https://unpluggediiot.com/go/cirrus-link
More from Unplugged: An IIoT Podcast
This episode is brought to you by Cirrus Link Solutions and Canary Labs. Cirrus Link: https://unpluggediiot.com/go/cirrus-link Canary Labs: https://unpluggediiot.com/go/canary-labs
Phil Seboa and Ed Fuentes sit down with David Ariens (Analytics For Industry / AVEVA) and Willem van Lammeren (Syensqo) to explore why IT/OT convergence fails — and what organisations actually get right when convergence works.
What changes when the assets you operate stop being centralised and predictable, and start being distributed, intermittent and weather-dependent? The old operations playbook breaks — and most digital programmes are still designed for the old one. Dr Hema Wadhwa, Associate, Data & Analytics | Asset Management and Performance at Aurecon, joins Phil Seboa and Ed Fuentes to talk about building digital asset intelligence for the energy transition. Hema's career is a live map of that transition: she started as a Floating Systems Engineer in global oil and gas, moved through subsea engineering and power generation operations, and now leads digital strategy and analytics for mixed energy asset fleets. Key topics in this episode: - The unplanned career arc — floating production systems and subsea engineering into renewable operations - "Are you here to take my job?" — what digital transformation actually feels like from inside the control room - Why the solution providers have to evolve, not the operators - One gas turbine versus a hundred wind turbines: why renewable fleets break the old operations model - No standard across vendor SCADA screens and UIs, and what that inconsistency costs - Why there is no AI magic without the data groundwork first — and why selling it that way isn't ethical - Cognitive load: lean frontline teams, PDF report fatigue, and tools that land as a burden - OT/IT convergence and the cybersecurity questions that come with opening it up - OEM warranties and whether asset owners really have access to their own asset data - Recording data when it changes, not on a fixed scan rate - One source of truth, different views per role — data presented so it guides a decision - Predicting failures months ahead: cranes, spares, and turning downtime into planned work - BESS as a trading platform, not just another renewable asset - Why the real cost driver is people, and why it only stacks up if it scales across assets
Every IIoT project starts the same way: you need data out of a PLC. The standard answer is OPC-UA — but what if that protocol is overloading your PLCs, eating bandwidth, and costing you thousands in upsized hardware? In this episode, Christofer Dutz — creator of Apache PLC4X and CEO of ToddySoft GmbH — joins Phil Seboa and Ed Fuentes to explain why speaking the native tongue of your PLCs is faster, cheaper, and more efficient than wrapping everything in OPC-UA. Chris shares how PLC4X pulled 2,600 data points every 200 milliseconds at just 2–3% CPU overhead — compared to OPC-UA choking at 200 data points every two seconds on the same hardware. The conversation covers the origin of PLC4X (a "JDBC for industrial automation"), the not-invented-here syndrome that created today's protocol mess, why open-source adoption in OT is still painfully slow, the role of Apache IoTDB as a time-series storage engine handling 1.5 billion insertions per second, and Chris's new commercial venture ToddySoft — bringing production-grade Rust-based drivers to platforms like Inductive Automation's Ignition. Whether you're an automation engineer drowning in protocol adapters or an IT architect trying to bridge the OT gap, this episode is packed with practical insight from someone who has spent a decade making PLCs talk. Connect with Christofer on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/christoferdutz Connect with Phil on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/phil-seboa Connect with Ed on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/ed-fuentes Sign up for the Unplugged newsletter: unpluggediiot.com/newsletter Learn more about ToddySoft: toddysoft.com Learn more about Apache PLC4X: plc4x.apache.org