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Fledge Issues 2.0 Release With Support for Enhanced Data Types, New Plugins and More

By Blog, Fledge

Fledge—the open source Industrial IoT system—is now available in its 2.0 release. Fledge, an LF Edge project, is an open source framework and community for the industrial edge focused on critical operations, predictive maintenance, situational awareness and safety. Fledge is architected to integrate Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), sensors and modern machines with the cloud and existing “brown field” systems like historians, Distributed Control Systems (DCS), Program Logic Controllers (PLC) and Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA). All share a common set of administration and application APIs.

“I am extremely happy to announce the general availability of the Fledge 2.0 release”, said Mark Riddoch, Fledge TSC Co-chair, “It’s exciting to see the new release provides a scalable, secure, robust infrastructure for collecting data from sensors, processing data at the edge using intelligent data pipelines and transporting data to historian and other management systems.”

The 2.0 release adds a number of significant new features, among them are

  • Support for enhanced data types including vector data and images allowing computer vision techniques to be used in sensor data collection.
  • The introduction of a control flow allowing Fledge to be used not just to gather sensor data but to allow non-time critical control features.
  • A set of new features targeted to help both no-code data pipeline developers and developers of new plugins.
  • Expanded and restructured documentation including a best practices guide for developing data pipelines.
  • The notification and alerting system have been enhanced to allow for watchdog monitors to be added to the data flows into Fledge.
  • A number of new plugins have been added to the ever growing list of those available within Fledge.

A myriad of other new features, enhancements and bug fixes are also included, full details can be found in the release notes available as part of the online documentation.

Join the Fledge community

You can visit Fledge wiki to contribute to the project. If your organization is in the energy sector, please visit Fledge Power wiki. You can also attend the regular Technical Steering Committee (TSC) meeting to ask questions and hear what the community is doing next.

October 5, 2022

LF Edge Releases Industry-Defining Edge Computing White Paper to Accelerate Edge/ IoT Deployments

By Akraino, Announcement, Baetyl, EdgeX Foundry, eKuiper, Fledge, Home Edge, LF Edge, Open Horizon, Project EVE, Secure Device Onboard, State of the Edge

Collaborative community white paper refines the definitions and nuances of open source edge computing across telecom, industrial, cloud, enterprise and consumer markets

 SAN FRANCISCO – June 24, 2022 –  LF Edge, an umbrella organization under the Linux Foundation that aims to establish an open, interoperable framework for edge computing independent of hardware, silicon, cloud, or operating system, today announced continued ecosystem collaboration via a new collaborative white paper, “Sharpening the Edge II: Diving Deeper into the LF Edge Taxonomy & Projects.” 

A follow-up to the LF Edge community’s original, collaborative 2020 paper – which provides an overview of the organization and details the LF Edge taxonomy, high level considerations for developing edge solutions and key use cases, – the new publication dives deeper into key areas of edge manageability, security, connectivity and analytics, and highlights how each project addresses these areas. The paper demonstrates maturation of the edge ecosystem and how the rapidly growing LF Edge community has made great progress over the past two years towards building an open, modular framework for edge computing. As with the first publication, the paper addresses  a balance of interests spanning the cloud, telco, IT, OT, IoT, mobile, and consumer markets.  

“With the growing edge computing infrastructure market set to be worth up to $800B by 2028, our LF Edge project communities are evolving,” said Jason Shepherd, VP Ecosystem, ZEDEDA  and former LF Edge Governing Board Chair. “This paper outlines industry direction through an LF Edge community lens. With such a diverse set of knowledgeable stakeholders, the report is an accurate reflection of a unified approach to defining open edge computing.” 

“I’m eager to continue to champion and spearhead the great work of the LF Edge community as the new board chair,” said Tina Tsou, new Governing Board chair, LF Edge.  “The Taxonomy white paper that demonstrates the accelerated community momentum seen by open source edge communities is really exciting and speaks to the power of open source.” 

The white paper, which is now available for download,  was put together as the result of broad community collaboration, spanning insights and expertise from subject matter experts across LF Edge project communities: Akraino, EdgeX Foundry, EVE, Fledge, Open Horizon, State of the Edge, Alvarium, Baetyl, eKuiper, and FIDO Device Onboard. 

ONE Summit North America 2022

Join the broader open source ecosystem spanning Networking, Edge, Access, Cloud and Core at ONE Summit North America, November 15-16 in Seattle, Wash. ONE Summit is the one industry event focused on best practices, technical challenges, and business opportunities facing decision makers across integrated verticals such as 5G, Cloud, Telco, and Enterprise Networking, as well as Edge, Access, IoT, and Core. The Call for Proposals is now open through July 8, 2022. Sponsorship opportunities are also available. 

 

About The Linux Foundation 

Founded in 2000, the Linux Foundation is supported by more than 1,000 members and is the world’s leading home for collaboration on open source software, open standards, open data, and open hardware. Linux Foundation’s projects are critical to the world’s infrastructure including Linux, Kubernetes, Node.js, and more.  The Linux Foundation’s methodology focuses on leveraging best practices and addressing the needs of contributors, users and solution providers to create sustainable models for open collaboration. For more information, please visit us at linuxfoundation.org.

The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see our trademark usage page: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/trademark-usage. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.

 

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June 24, 2022

LF Edge Member Spotlight: OSIsoft

By Blog, Fledge, LF Edge, Member Spotlight

The LF Edge community is comprised of a diverse set of member companies and people that represent the IoT, Enterprise, Cloud and Telco Edge. The Member Spotlight blog series highlights these members and how they are contributing to and leveraging open source edge solutions. Today, we sit down with Daniel Lazaro, Senior Technical Program Manager at OSIsoft, to discuss the importance of open source, collaborating with industry leaders in edge computing, their contributions to Fledge and the impact of being a part of the LF Edge ecosystem.

Can you tell us a little about your organization?

Since 1980, OSIsoft has focused on a single goal: getting operations data into the hands of industrial professionals so that they have the information they need to reduce costs, increase productivity and transform business. Decades ago, before the modern internet, big data, or AI arrived on the scene, the company’s flagship PI System software became known for breaking ground as a historian: a database used by engineers in an operational environment that captures streaming, time-series data that reflects the state of the physical equipment (assets).

Over time, the PI System has expanded to meet modern industrial needs, allowing not only operations staff but also executives, software developers, data scientists and others to understand, share, and make decisions based on highly curated operations data. With its addition of edge and cloud-based capabilities, the PI System now makes this essential data accessible, usable and valuable to people, systems and communities of customers, suppliers and partners across and beyond the enterprise.

Why is your organization adopting an open source approach?

Open source enables collaboration and integration of heterogeneous technologies across organizational boundaries. Moreover, it provides a platform for innovation to create solutions designed to address technical and business challenges such as those at the edge. Our CEO and founder Pat Kennedy saw the opportunity for an open source approach to address such challenges at the edge and started Dianomic. We believe that open source is the fast track to innovation. Industrial systems are unique in the number of protocols, data mappings and overall diversity. Open source can uniquely address these edge computing challenges by collaborating on code that all participants can access, modify and expand upon.

Why did you join LF Edge and what sort of impact do you think LF Edge has on the edge, networking, and IoT industries?

Zededa introduced Dianomic to LF Edge before its inception. As a result, Dianomic and OSIsoft joined as founding members. The original idea was and remains to build a thriving open source industrial community. This is a challenge to the Linux Foundation in that industrial companies have not been traditional open source users. The operations (OT) side of the Industrial market tends not to be software/compute experts, they are machine, manufacturing and process experts.

LF Edge curates several open source projects and a community around them that addresses the challenges of edge computing in a wide range of vertical markets at the edge of the network. This framework provides a collaboration platform for organizations to build non-differentiating infrastructure for solutions at the edge driven by inherent tradeoffs between the benefits of centralization and decentralization.

LF Edge plays a critical role helping accelerate deployments of Industrial IoT enabling and expanding visibility of previously untapped aspects of operations.

What do you see as the top benefits of being part of the LF Edge community?

In the LF Edge community, we see a group of like-minded organizations willing to work together. By collaborating through open source, we join forces to build the framework and ecosystem for the future of edge computing. Each project targets different pieces of the puzzle or building blocks to assemble in order to address the complexities encountered at the edge. Divide and conquer, focus, specialize and thrive. The community ecosystem provides learning and growing opportunities and a better together experience. At the same time, it enables exciting new revenue opportunities for new types of services and customers.

What sort of contributions has your team made to the community, ecosystem through LF Edge participation?

As a Premier member of LF Edge, OSIsoft actively influences the strategic and technical direction of LF Edge as voting members of the Governing Board and technical advisory council. OSIsoft brings its industrial perspective and expertise to LF Edge and contributes its vision working with different committees and through public speaking at various LF Edge related events. Our contributions play an important role in nurturing and growing a community of end users across various industry verticals within LF Edge. The end user vertical solution group kicked off October, 2020 with presentations by industrial companies showcasing valuable use cases implementing solutions using LF Edge projects.

We believe that the industrial edge has a different set of requirements that are better addressed with a specialized approach tailored to its specific needs, namely Fledge. The thriving and growing Fledge community of industrials has contributed back code to the project already deployed in production environments today. This adds to the previous contributions by service providers, system integrators, OEMs such as Dianomic, OSIsoft and Google to name a few. Fledge started when Dianomic contributed the entire FogLAMP stack in winter of 2019. At that time, the code was in its 8th release and had been commercially deployed in energy, manufacturing and mining operations.

Fledge works closely with other LF Edge projects such as EVE and Akraino. EVE provides system and orchestration services and a container runtime for Fledge applications and services. Together industrial operators can build, manage, secure and support both Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) and non-SCADA connected machines, IIoT and sensors as they scale. Fledge is also integrated with Akraino, as both projects support the roll out 5G and private LTE networks.

What do you think sets LF Edge apart from other industry alliances?

Traditionally, alliances have focused on delivering recommendations, guidelines or standards Instead, LF Edge focuses on delivering reference implementations in the form of quality open source software ready for adopters to integrate in their solutions. The strong communities of end users and developers around the software that customize, integrate, implement and contribute back to the projects sets LF Edge apart.

How will LF Edge help your business?

The LF Edge framework lowers the barrier to adoption of edge computing solutions translating in increased industrial implementations that enable new use cases that were not technically possible or cost effective before. This allows OSIsoft customers to rapidly expand their real-time data infrastructure to new systems and devices in industry and operations for greater visibility into operations and business, faster decisions and higher value.

Moreover,  LF Edge enables the expansion to new market opportunities through technical solutions as well as its communities of end users and vertical solutions. LF Edge governance provides customers with confidence that the projects within the framework are developed with broad industry support and openness without vendor lock-in.

Finally, access to a large developer community and marketing efforts are opportunities to share resources and drive down costs.

What advice would you give to someone considering joining LF Edge?

Get familiar with the framework and ecosystem of projects. You can start by checking the website and read the various resources available, white papers and documentation provided by the community. Identify the projects, groups and communities that align with your organization’s goals. Join the relevant groups and communities, mailing lists and calls, listen in and learn and when you are ready participate and contribute. If you identify gaps or have solutions that can enrich the current ecosystem, bring them on. Contributions come in many shapes, not just code, and they are the means to drive direction and influence within LF Edge.

To find out more about LF Edge members or how to join, click here. To learn more about Fledge, click here. To see use cases for Fledge, check out these videos. Additionally, if you have questions or comments, visit the LF Edge Slack Channel and share your thoughts in the #fledge, #fledge-help or #fledge-tsc channels.

November 19, 2020

On the “Edge” of Something Great

By Akraino, Announcement, Baetyl, Blog, EdgeX Foundry, Fledge, Home Edge, LF Edge, Open Horizon, Project EVE, Secure Device Onboard, State of the Edge

As we kick off Open Networking and Edge Summit today, we are celebrating the edge by sharing the results of our first-ever LF Edge Member Survey and insight into what our focuses are next year.

LF Edge, which will celebrate its 2nd birthday in January 2021, sent the survey to our more than 75 member companies and liaisons. The survey featured about 15 questions that collected details about open source and edge computing, how members of the LF Edge community are using edge computing and what project resources are most valuable. 

Why did you chose to participate in LF Edge?

The Results Are In

The Top 3 reasons to participate in LF Edge are market creation and adoption acceleration, collaboration with peers and industry influence. 

  • More than 71% joined LF Edge for market creation and adoption acceleration
  • More than 57% indicated they joined LF Edge for business development
  • More than 62% have either deployed products or services based on LF Edge Projects or they are planned by for later this year, next year or within the next 3-5 years

Have you deployed products or services based on LF Edge Projects?

This feedback corresponds with what we’re seeing in some of the LF Edge projects. For example, our Stage 3 Projects Akraino and EdgeX Foundry are already being deployed. Earlier this summer, Akraino launched its Release 3 (R3) that delivers a fully functional open source edge stack that enables a diversity of edge platforms across the globe. With R3, Akraino brings deployments and PoCs from a swath of global organizations including Aarna Networks, China Mobile, Equinix, Futurewei, Huawei, Intel, Juniper, Nokia, NVIDIA, Tencent, WeBank, WiPro, and more. 

Additionally, EdgeX Foundry has hit more than 7 million container downloads last month and a global ecosystem of complementary products and services that continues to increase. As a result, EdgeX Foundry is seeing more end-user case studies from big companies like Accenture, ThunderSoft and Jiangxing Intelligence. 

Have you gained insight into end user requirements through open collaboration?


Collaboration with peers

The edge today is a solution-specific story. Equipment and architectures are purpose-built for specific use cases, such as 5G and network function virtualization, next-generation CDNs and cloud, and streaming games. Which is why collaboration is key and more than 70% of respondents said they joined LF Edge to collaborate with peers. Here are a few activities at ONES that showcase the cross-project and members collaboration. 

Additionally, LF Edge created a LF Edge Vertical Solutions Group that is working to enable easily-customized deployments based on market/vertical requirements. In fact, we are hosting an LF Edge End User Community Event on October 1 that provides a platform for discussing the utilization of LF Edge Projects in real-world applications. The goal of these sessions is to educate the LF Edge community (both new and existing) to make sure we appropriately tailor the output of our project collaborations to meet end user needs. Learn more.

Industry Influence

More than 85% of members indicated they have gained insights into end user requirements through open collaboration. A common definition of the edge is gaining momentum. Community efforts such as LF Edge and State of the Edge’s assets, the Open Glossary of Edge Computing, and the Edge Computing Landscape are providing cohesion and unifying the industry. In fact,  LF Edge members in all nine of the projects collaborated to create an industry roadmap that is being supported by global tech giants and start-ups alike.

 

 

Where do we go from here? 

When asked, LF Edge members didn’t hold back. They want more. They want to see more of everything – cross-project collaboration, end user events and communication, use cases, open source collaboration with other liaisons. As we head into 2021, LF Edge will continue to lay the groundwork for markets like cloud native, 5G, and edge for  more open deployments and collaboration.  

 

September 29, 2020

LF Edge Demos at Open Networking & Edge Summit

By Blog, EdgeX Foundry, Event, Fledge, LF Edge, Open Horizon, Project EVE, Secure Device Onboard

Open Networking & Edge Summit, which takes place virtually on September 28-30, is co-sponsored by LF Edge, the Linux Foundation and LF Networking. With thousands expected to attend, ONES will be the epicenter of edge, networking, cloud and IoT. If you aren’t registered yet – it takes two minutes to register for US$50 – click here.

Several LF Edge members will be at the conference leading discussions about trends, presenting use cases and sharing best practices. For a list of LF Edge focuses sessions, click here and add them to your schedule. LF Edge will also host a pavilion – in partnership with our sister organization LF Networking – that will showcase demos, including the debut of two new ones that feature a collaboration between Project EVE and Fledge and Open Horizon and Secure Device Onboarding. Check out the sneak peek of the demos below:

Managing Industrial IoT Data Using LF Edge (Fledge, EVE)

Presented by Flir, Dianomic, OSIsoft, ZEDEDA and making its debut at ONES, this demo showcases the strength of Project EVE and Fledge. The demo Fledge will show how the two open source projects work together to securely manage, connect, aggregate, process, buffer and forward any sensor, machine or PLC’s data to existing OT systems and any cloud. Specifically, it will show a FLIR IR Camera video and data feeds being managed as described.

 

Real-Time Sensor Fusion for Loss Detection (EdgeX Foundry):

Presented by LF Edge members HP, Intel and IOTech, this demo showcases the strength of the Open Retail Initiative and EdgeX Foundry. Learn how different sensor devices can use LF Edge’s EdgeX Foundry open-middleware framework to optimize retail operations and detect loss at checkout. The sensor fusion is implemented using a modular approach, combining point-of-sale , computer vision, RFID and scale data into a POC for loss prevention.

This demo was featured at the National Retail Federation Show in January. More details about the demo can be found in HP’s blog and  Intel blog.

               

Low-touch automated onboarding and application delivery with Open Horizon and Secure Device Onboard

Presented by IBM and Intel, this demo features two of the newest projects accepted into the LF Edge ecosystem – Secure Device Onboard was announced in July while Open Horizon was announced in April.

An OEM or ODM can generate a voucher with SDO utilities that is tied to a specific device. Upon purchase, they can send the voucher to the purchaser. With LF Edge’s Open Horizon Secure Device Onboard integration, an administrator can load the voucher into Open Horizon and pre-register the device. Once the device is powered on and connected to the network, it will automatically authenticate, download and install the Open Horizon agent, and begin negotiation to receive and run relevant workloads.

For more information about ONES, visit the main website: https://events.linuxfoundation.org/open-networking-edge-summit-north-america/. 

September 16, 2020

Fledge, an LF Edge Project, Enters Growth Stage as Release 1.8 Enables Open Industrial Edge Software with AI/ML, and Public Cloud Integration

By Announcement, Fledge
  • Expanded community includes integrations and contributions from Google, Nokia, Flir, OSIsoft, Nexcom, RoviSys, Advantech, Wago, Zededa and Dianomic
  • Supports complementary products and services from a global open ecosystem, with commercial support, developer support, training, ML/AI applications and scale-up and out management
  • Use cases include Gradient Racing, which uses Fledge and Google Cloud to optimize complex machine configurations and operations using ML/AI, car and driver simulators and race track digital twins  

SAN FRANCISCO – July 30, 2020 –  LF Edge, an umbrella organization within the Linux Foundation that aims to establish an open, interoperable framework for edge computing independent of hardware, silicon, cloud, or operating system, today announced maturing of its Fledge project, which has issued it’s 1.8  release and moved to the Growth Stage within the LF Edge umbrella. Fledge is an open source framework for the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), used to implement predictive maintenance, situational awareness, safety and other critical operations.  Deployed in industrial use cases since early 2018, Fledge integrates IIoT, sensors, machines, ML/AI tools-processes-workloads, and cloud/s with the current industrial production systems and levels, as per ISA-95.  

Fledge v1.8 is the first release since moving to the Linux Foundation. However, this is the ninth release of the  project code that has over 60,000 commits, averaging 8,500 commits/month. Concurrently, Fledge has matured into a Stage 2 or “Growth Stage” project within LF Edge. This maturity level is for projects interested in reaching the Impact Stage, and have identified a growth plan for doing so. Growth Stage projects receive mentorship from the Technical Advisory Committee (TAC) and are expected to actively develop their community of contributors, governance, project documentation, and other variables identified in the growth plan that factor in to broad success and adoption.

“Fledge, initially seeded by OSISoft and Dianomic and now a diverse project within LF Edge, is a great example of open source integration. By working closely with Google and other ecosystem partners on new and emerging use cases, we are bringing the power of LF Edge to a broader market,” said  Arpit Joshipura, general manager, Networking, Edge and IoT, the Linux Foundation. “We look forward to building an open community of industrial users, suppliers and integrators.”  

Utilizing Fledge to gather and analyze machine, process, environment and operator data in context, improved efficiency, quality and safety is achieved.  Gradient Racing used Fledge, Google Cloud, and Motorsports.AI to build IIoT based digital twins of each track, a machine simulator and an operator simulator to optimize car configurations and driving strategy before each race.  Using Fledge, TensorFlow and Kubernetes, two all-time track records were broken in the GT3 2019 season. See the full story here.  

“Google Cloud helps customers deliver artificial intelligence to applications from the edge to the cloud,”  said Craig Wiley, director of Product Management for Google Cloud AI.  “Fledge’s ability to collect, process, transform and send machine data as well as run TensorFlow Lite on the edge makes it an excellent complement to Google’s AI platform. As an active member of the Linux Foundation, Google is proud to support this open source community through contributions to the Fledge project, empowering next generation industrial processes and machines.”

Fledge has rapidly become one of the most active open source IIoT projects. Adding to the momentum are new contributors, contributions and integrations. Highlights include:  

  • Google’s contribution of its IoT Core North Plugin, enables secure, reliable transfer of data to Google cloud services like machine learning.   
  • OSIsoft’s contribution of  the Web API North Plugin, enables Fledge secure, reliable transfer of telemetry and metadata to existing ISA95 systems like PI, OCS and EDS.   
  • Nexcom’s contribution of CAN bus 2.0, J1708 and J1939 south plugins provide real-time monitoring for fleet management of cars and heavy duty trucks.   
  • Dianomic’s contribution of new core services, alert services and orchestration services enable advanced vibration-based applications, more security and scalable management.   
  • Nokia integrated Fledge with the Nokia Digital Automation Cloud (NDAC), Nokia’s industrial-grade private wireless network.  
  • Google and Nexcom completed integration of Fledge within Google’s Coral line of ML processors and Nexcom’s industrial gateways.  
  • Flir and Dianomic completed a south plugin integration with Flir’s line of industrial infrared cameras.  

Industrial Operational Technology (OT) markets are new to the Linux Foundation, and open source projects are new to OT use cases. Like the LAMP stack enabled web application development, the Fledge project’s mission is to enable IIoT application development.  Together we can solve the diversity and complexity issues when collecting and processing data beyond  current control networks and eliminate silos of data by integrating with mission-critical ISA95 systems, ML systems, and the cloud.  

Learn more about Fledge in an upcoming On the Edge with LF Edge webinar, entitled “How Google, OSIsoft, FLIR and Dianomic use Fledge to implement Industrial 4.0,” August 13 at 9 am PT. Details and registration here:https://zoom.us/webinar/register/9215960636525/WN_1jGqjfJoT4-Iv2y6YDGgYg 

Join Fledge and other LF Edge projects at the Open Networking & Edge Summit (ONES), a virtual experience happening September 28-30. ONES is the industry’s premier open networking event now expanded to comprehensively cover Edge Computing, Edge Cloud & IoT. Open Networking & Edge Summit (ONES) enables collaborative development and innovation across enterprises, service providers/telcos and cloud providers to shape the future of networking and edge computing. Learn more and register today: https://events.linuxfoundation.org/open-networking-edge-summit-north-america/

Industry Support for Flege

Advantech
“Advantech is pleased to be part of the Linux Foundation Fledge 1.8 project along with our solution partner, Dianomic,” said David Liu, director of IoT solutions and strategic alliances at Advantech. “Our company vision is to ‘Enable an Intelligent Planet.’ Open source application stacks for an industrial transformation, along with our rugged hardware, help complete that vision. As a leader in IoT intelligent systems and embedded platforms, we strive every day to better assist partners and customers in connecting their industrial chains through IoT hardware and software solutions with edge intelligence. The field-tested Fledge solution will play a key part in our continued efforts to co-create advanced solutions for a wide range of industries in the Industrial IoT.”

Dianomic 
“Dianomic and OSIsoft were pleased to contribute the FogLAMP code to seed the Linux Foundation’s Fledge project for the Industrial IoT Edge.”  said Tom Arthur, CEO Dianomic.  “This first release of Fledge 1.8 is a mature, field-tested solution already operating in power generation, power transmission & distribution, water & wastewater processing, discrete manufacturing, mining and professional auto racing. We invite manufacturers, equipment suppliers, system integrators and partners to join our community as we grow THE open source application stack for industrial transformations.”  

FLIR 
“For more than 40 years, FLIR thermal imaging has provided technologies for industrial users to improve their capabilities and safety on the job,”  said Chris Bainter, Director Global Business Development.  “Partnering with Dianomic we deployed our Ax8 and 300 series cameras using Fledge in energy substations and wastewater plants. Fledge easily and successfully integrated our sensor’s video, IR video and temperature reading outputs into our client’s existing operational, maintenance and safety systems. Fledge proved to Flir the future of open source for industrial 4.0 applications has arrived.”   

Nexcom 
“NEXCOM is proud to support FLEDGE from the Linux Foundation, establishing a growing line of preloaded and edge-enabled industrial gateways.” said Alexander Su, “The pre-configured products include the NIFE 105 for fixed assets, and the VTC 1910 targeted at transportation related use cases. In addition, NEXCOM has contributed code to the Linux Foundation supporting FLEDGE southbound plugins for CAN 2.0,  J1708 and J1939, to provide real-time monitoring for fleet management. The MVS2623 with Coral intelligence, provides a powerful purpose-built gateway combining the flexibility of FLEDGE with the strength of Google’s Edge TPU, better enabling edge use cases like real-time object detection from IP or USB cameras.”

Nokia 
Janne Parantainen, head of technology, Nokia Digital Automation said: “We run Fledge 1.8 on our edge platform bringing the benefits of optimized wireless communication to the industrial protocol domain and enabling new use cases across multiple industries. Deployed as part of our Nokia Digital Automation Cloud, it offers a way to transfer legacy industrial protocol data to new solutions. Nokia Digital Automation Cloud provides 5G-ready, reliable wireless connectivity, industrial applications and industrial ruggedized devices for addressing Industry 4.0 needs” www.dac.nokia.com

OSIsoft 
“OSIsoft’s  PI System is the most trusted source of real-time operational data. We enable the collection, standardization, contextualization and federation of large volumes of industrial, operational data.“  said Richard Beeson, CTO OSIsoft. “Fledge solves the diversity and complexity issues when collecting and processing data beyond the process control network.  OSIsoft recommends all our industrial customers and partners begin their IIoT journey by integrating Fledge into their industrial 4.0 deployments and asks them to join our growing community.”  

Rovisys  
“As an Operation Technology (OT) solution provider that is actively venturing into the world of Industrial AI, RoviSys sees value in using Fledge to collect manufacturing and IIoT data from the plant floor, including connecting to historians and cloud-based advanced data analytic platforms.”  said Bryan DeBlois, Director of Industrial AI RoviSys.  “Furthermore, commercially supported FogLAMP enables us to implement vibration analysis, apply machine learning models and detect anomalies to predict quality, improve maintenance, and monitor setpoints.  This helps our customers minimize downtime and maximize production efficiencies across their entire operation.”

TQS Integration
“With Fledge, industrial manufacturing now gets the technology needed to acquire datasets from sources that had previously not been able to cross the threshold of traditional cost-benefit analyses. Fledge is uniquely placed to solve data collection on the edge, and within existing process control networks, providing customers the flexibility to apply Industry 4.0 technologies with their entire infrastructure,” said Tom Quilty, director of Technology for TQS Integration. “With Fledge, we can advance our customer’s ability to maximize their current investments, maximize the value gained from IIoT devices and accelerate time-to-value for Industry 4.0 applications.”

WAGO 
“WAGO, a technology leader of industrial control and interconnect products, strives to be the backbone of a smart connected world.  This backbone is created  through constant innovation and empowered connections with our customers and industry partners.  Technologies like the Linux Foundation’s Fledge 1.8, and partners like Dianomic help our customers realize their true potential and expand on what is possible in an industrial control system.   The WAGO 750 Series has millions of units installed globally and supports applications with over 300 IO modules and more than 16 industrial fieldbus protocols offered.  Leveraging WAGO with Linux & Docker capabilities  provides the means to  add IIoT platforms like Fledge and benefit from all that Fledge offers to simplify cloud integration, management, and orchestration. Employing WAGO for ease of field wiring, data collection and/or control tasks while using the IEC 61131-3 PLC runtime and integrating it with the possibilities of Fledge creates a powerful platform for a smart connected world.”

ZEDEDA
“The most successful organizations going forward will have a model strongly rooted in an open philosophy that facilitates interoperability and agility, and the industrial market is no exception,” said Jason Shepherd, VP Ecosystem, ZEDEDA. “Dianomic’s FogLAMP offer is tailored to the unique needs of industrial customers and their open source foundation hosted in LF Edge helps customers mitigate lock-in and focus on value creation rather than reinvention. We look forward to working with Dianomic within our growing ecosystem to address critical business needs for industrial customers.”

About the Linux Foundation
Founded in 2000, the Linux Foundation is supported by more than 1,000 members and is the world’s leading home for collaboration on open source software, open standards, open data, and open hardware. Linux Foundation’s projects are critical to the world’s infrastructure including Linux, Kubernetes, Node.js, and more.  The Linux Foundation’s methodology focuses on leveraging best practices and addressing the needs of contributors, users and solution providers to create sustainable models for open collaboration. For more information, please visit us at linuxfoundation.org.

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The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see our trademark usage page: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/trademark-usage. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.

July 30, 2020

LF Edge Expands Ecosystem with Open Horizon, adds Seven New Members and Reaches Critical Deployment Milestones

By Akraino Edge Stack, Announcement, Baetyl, EdgeX Foundry, Fledge, Home Edge, LF Edge, Open Horizon, Project EVE, State of the Edge

  • Open Horizon, an application and metadata delivery platform, is now part of LF Edge as a Stage 1 (At-Large) Project.
  • New members bring R&D expertise in Telco, Enterprise and Cloud Edge Infrastructure.
  • EdgeX Foundry hits 4.3 million downloads and Akraino R2 delivers 14 validated deployment-ready blueprints.
  • Fledge shares a race car use case optimizing car and driver operations using Google Cloud, Machine Learning and state-of-the-art digital twins and simulators.

SAN FRANCISCO – April 30, 2020 –  LF Edge, an umbrella organization under The Linux Foundation that aims to establish an open, interoperable framework for edge computing independent of hardware, silicon, cloud, or operating system, today announced continued project momentum with the addition a new project and several technical milestones for EdgeX Foundry, Akraino Edge Stack and Fledge. Additionally, the project welcomes seven new members including CloudBrink, Federated Wireless, Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI), Kaloom, Ori Industries, Tensor Networks and VoerEir to its ecosystem.

Open Horizon, an existing project contributed by IBM, is a platform for managing the service software lifecycle of containerized workloads and related machine learning assets. It enables autonomous management of applications deployed to distributed webscale fleets of edge computing nodes and devices without requiring on-premise administrators.

Edge computing brings computation and data storage closer to where data is created by people, places, and things. Open Horizon simplifies the job of getting the right applications and machine learning onto the right compute devices, and keeps those applications running and updated. It also enables the autonomous management of more than 10,000 edge devices simultaneously – that’s 20 times as many endpoints as in traditional solutions.

“We are thrilled to welcome Open Horizon and new members to the LF Edge ecosystem,” said Arpit Joshipura, general manager, Networking, Edge & IoT, the Linux Foundation. “These additions complement our deployment ready LF Edge open source projects and our growing global ecosystem.”

“LF Edge is bringing together some of the most significant open source efforts in the industry, said Todd Moore, IBM VP Open Technology, “We are excited to contribute the Open Horizon project as this will expand the work with the other projects and companies to create shared approaches, open standards, and common interfaces and APIs.”

Open Horizon joins LF Edge’s other projects including: Akraino Edge Stack, Baetyl,  EdgeX Foundry, Fledge, Home Edge, Project EVE and State of the Edge. These projects support emerging edge applications across areas such as non-traditional video and connected things that require lower latency, and  faster processing and mobility. By forming a software stack that brings the best of cloud, enterprise and telecom, LF Edge helps to unify a fragmented edge market around a common, open vision for the future of the industry.

Since its launch last year, LF Edge projects have met significant milestones including:

  • EdgeX Foundry has hit 4.3 million docker downloads.
  • Akraino Edge Stack (Release 2) has 14 specific Blueprints that have all tested and validated on hardware labs and can be deployed immediately in various industries including Connected Vehicle, AR/VR, Integrated Cloud Native NFV, Network Cloud and Tungsten Fabric and SDN-Enabled Broadband Access.
  • Fledge shares a race car use case optimizing car and driver operations using Google Cloud, Machine Learning and state-of-the-art digital twins and simulators.
  • State of the Edge merged under LF Edge earlier this month and will continue to pave the path as the industry’s first open research program on edge computing. Under the umbrella, State of the Edge will continue its assets including State of the Edge Reports, Open Glossary of Edge Computing and the Edge Computing Landscape.

Support from the Expanding LF Edge Ecosystem

Federated Wireless:

“LF Edge has become a critical point of collaboration for network and enterprise edge innovators in this new cloud-driven IT landscape,” said Kurt Schaubach, CTO, Federated Wireless. “We joined the LF Edge to apply our connectivity and spectrum expertise to helping define the State of the Edge, and are energized by the opportunity to contribute to the establishment of next generation edge compute for the myriad of low latency applications that will soon be part of private 5G networks.”

Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI):

“ITRI is one of the world’s leading technology R&D institutions aiming to innovate a better future for society. Founded in 1973, ITRI has played a vital role in transforming Taiwan’s industries from labor-intensive into innovation-driven. We focus on the fields of Smart Living, Quality Health, and Sustainable Environment. Over the years, we also added a focus on 5G, AI, and Edge Computing related research and development. We joined LF Edge to leverage its leadership in these areas and to collaborate with the more than 75 member companies on projects like Akraino Edge Stack.”

Kaloom:

“Kaloom is pleased to join LF Edge to collaborate with the community on developing open, cloud-native networking, management and orchestration for edge deployments” said Suresh Krishnan, chief technology officer, Kaloom.  “We are working on an unified edge solution in order to optimize the use of resources while meeting the exacting performance, space and energy efficiency needs that are posed by edge deployments. We look forward to contributing our expertise in this space and to collaborating with the other members in LF Edge in accelerating the adoption of open source software, hardware and standards that speed up innovation and reduce TCO.”

Ori Industries:

“At Ori, we are fundamentally changing how software interacts with the distributed hardware on mobile operator networks.” said Mahdi Yahya, Founder and CEO, Ori Industries. “We also know that developers can’t provision, deploy and run applications seamlessly on telco infrastructure. We’re looking forward to working closely with the LF Edge community and the wider open-source ecosystem this year, as we turn our attention to developers and opening up access to the distributed, telco edge.”

Tensor Networks:

“Tensor Networks believes in and supports open source. Having an arena free from the risks of IP Infringement to collaborate and develop value which can be accessible to more people and organizations is essential to our efforts. Tensor runs its organization, and develops products on top of Linux.  The visions of LF Edge, where networks and latency are part of open software based service composition and delivery, align with our vision of open, fast, smart, secure, connected, and customer driven opportunities across all industry boundaries.” – Bill Walker, Chief Technology Officer.

VoerEir:

“In our extensive work with industry leaders for NFVI/VIM test and benchmarking,  a need to standardize infrastructure KPIs in Edge computing has gradually become more important,” said Arif  Khan, Co-Founder of VoerEir AB. “This need has made it essential for us to join LF Edge and to initiate the new Feature Project “Kontour” under the Akraino umbrella. We are excited to collaborate with various industry leaders to define, standardize  and measure Edge KPIs.”

About The Linux Foundation

Founded in 2000, the Linux Foundation is supported by more than 1,000 members and is the world’s leading home for collaboration on open source software, open standards, open data, and open hardware. Linux Foundation’s projects are critical to the world’s infrastructure including Linux, Kubernetes, Node.js, and more.  The Linux Foundation’s methodology focuses on leveraging best practices and addressing the needs of contributors, users and solution providers to create sustainable models for open collaboration. For more information, please visit us at linuxfoundation.org.

The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see our trademark usage page: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/trademark-usage. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.

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April 30, 2020

Winning GT3 Racing with LF Edge’s Fledge

By Blog, Fledge, Use Cases

Optimizing machine operations using Industrial IoT Fledge with Google Cloud, ML and state-of-the-art digital twins and simulators

Gradient Racing is a professional auto racing team based in Austin, Texas.  One of Honda’s customers for NSX GT3 Evo, Gradient is committed to using cutting edge technology to gain an edge in GT racing.

Modern race cars have thousands of adjustable parameters in their suspension, aerodynamics, transmission and other systems.  Finding the perfect configuration of these parameters for a given driver, track and race strategy is key to winning races. In GT racing, this has been more art than science, with drivers making multiple test runs and working with the race team to adjust the car based on feel.

Like Formula One and Nascar, Gradient wanted to bring state-of-the-art simulation technology to bear on this problem, believing that it would allow them to configure the car far more precisely. To do this, they engaged Motorsports.ai, a leader in racing modeling.

Creating a Virtual Racing Environment

Motorsports.ai’s goal was to create a full simulation environment of the race: a simulated driver, a simulated car and a digital twin of the track.  While car simulation software was commercially available, Motorsports.ai decided to use machine learning technology to develop an AI driver that would react to conditions in the same way as Gradient’s human driver.

Motorsports.ai deployed the Linux Foundation’s Fledge for three functions.  First, to collect the massive amount of data required to train the machine learning system. Second, to validate the race simulations of car, driver and track.  Last, to help validate the digital twin of each race track.  Originally developed by Dianomic Systems, Fledge joined LF Edge, an umbrella organization that aims to establish an open, interoperable framework for edge computing independent of hardware, silicon, cloud, or operating system, last year. Fledge is an open-source Industrial IoT framework to collect sensor data, enhance it with meta information, run ML models on the edge and reliably transport data  to central or cloud-based processing systems. In a matter of weeks, Motorsports.ai developed the plugins needed to interface Fledge with the race car’s CAN Bus and Eclipse Cyclone DDS interfaces to over 2000 in-car sensors..

The human driver made multiple test runs on the track to determine his reaction to different conditions. Twenty times a second, Fledge collected readings on every aspect of car performance, as well as driver actions such as gas pedal and brake pressure, steering angle and gear changes.  Fledge enhanced each reading with the precise timestamp and GPS location of the car on the track.  Overall, Fledge collected more than 1GB of data on each test run, which it buffered and automatically transmitted to Google Cloud at the end of the run.  Motorsports.ai fed this data into TensorFlow running on a 20 node Google Kubernetes Engine cluster to validate the digital twin, and improve the accuracy of the predictions.

To build the model, Motorsports.ai integrated Fledge into a highly accurate simulation, and virtual prototyping environment to collect the same data as was collected in the physical car. Using TensorFlow, they then run distributed machine learning jobs using the KubeFlow framework on the aforementioned kubernetes cluster. Fledge is used to manage the sensor data from both the actual and virtual track runs. Motorsports.ai uses these results to provide predictions that ensure a competitive performance.

A key attribute for a digital twin is validation, and verification, which in this case requires precise mapping of the track surface type. The coefficient of friction between the car’s tires and track varies at each venue, the surface could be asphalt, concrete, painted, or all of the above. To identify the surface type for the digital twin, an Intel RealSense camera was deployed on the car, oriented to the track.  ML models running on the NVIDIA Jetson Xavier platform were then used to identify surface categories while Fledge added the telemetry, and timestamp to the ML models surface type category predictions.

Winning the Race

Gradient used the Motorsports.ai simulation to optimize suspension and alignment settings for every race in 2019.  The simulation enabled far more rigorous tuning than their previous manual method.  Instead of building a configuration based on a few laps and driver “feel”, they were able to run tens of thousands of simulations using precise measurement.  They were able to investigate conditions that had not yet been experienced on the actual track and ensure that they could compete effectively in them.

For example, for tire camber alone they ran 244 simulations, testing the camber of each tire at 0.1° increments through a range of -3.0° to +3.0°.  All told, Gradient simulated more than 10,000 track runs for each race, orders of magnitude more than would have been possible using a human driver.

The results showed on the scoreboard. Gradient broke the Circuit of the Americas track record by over 1.1 seconds and the Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course record by more than 1 second. They continued their success at other races and took home the national GTB1 championship title of the 2019 Pirelli Triple Trofeo.

To learn more about Fledge, visit https://www.lfedge.org/projects/fledge/, get the code here, or engage with the community on Slack (#fledge).  To learn more about LF Edge, visit https://www.lfedge.org/.

March 17, 2020

LF Edge Member Spotlight: Dianomic

By Blog, Fledge, Member Spotlight

The LF Edge community is comprised of a diverse set of member companies that represent the IoT, Enterprise, Cloud and Telco Edge. The Member Spotlight blog series highlights these members and how they are contributing to and leveraging open source edge solutions. Today, we sat down with Tom Arthur, CEO at Dianomic, and one of the creators of Fledge, to discuss the importance of a growing ecosystem, their Industrial IoT framework, the impact LF Edge has made and what the future holds for the company.

Can you tell us a little about your organization?

Our company name is Dianomic Systems.  It is derived from the Greek word dianomi meaning distribution.  As you may have guessed, edge computing is a challenging distributed computing problem.

The fragmentation and distribution of industrial data, networking, processing, security and storage makes managing it complicated.  Simplifying industrial IoT application and system development with a ubiquitous open source stack, standards, and community is our mission.

With our community, we created FogLAMP in 2018 then contributed all the code to the LF Edge’s Project Fledge to help address the industrial data problem.  Fledge is a stack of integrated microservices that operate from sensor to cloud (the edge).  These services connect any sensor or machine data, aggregate data, buffer data, transform data, filter data, execute AI/ML operations, alert, visualize and forward data to any cloud or on-prem destination.

 

Why is your organization adopting an open source approach?

 The LAMP stack is largely responsible for the success of web application development.   Almost every web, ecommerce and social network developer consumed it.  Dianomic believes a similar open source stack is required for Operational Technology (OT) to help drive Industrial 4.0 application development.   This is the Fledge community’s mission.

We already have several public use cases and many not yet public proving the open source approach works.

At Jacksonville Energy Authority (JEA), they deployed Fledge to monitor substation transformer’s oil pumps, oil temperature, cooling fans, ambient air temperature and hydrogen gas.  They are now also testing infrared cameras to monitor heat other heat sources in the substation and in their water business monitoring pumps and bearings.   Using Fledge’s PHP based plugin architecture they developed a KAFKA north connection to be their single pub-sub system for all their IIoT data requirements.   The goal is complete predictive and conditional monitoring of all non-SCADA systems.  This KAFKA north service was then contributed to the Fledge stack for the community and supported by Dianomic.   Fledge is then tightly integrated with both their OSIsoft PI systems (that monitors SCADA and DCS systems) and their Oracle ERP and maintenance systems.

At General Atomics (a General Dynamics spin-out), the maker of the U.S. Airforce’s Predator drone, Fledge is used to help monitor the manufacturing quality of the fuselage, wings and stabilizers.   These components are made of composites where heat and humidity are tightly controlled.   Fledge is used with industrial grade explosion proof sensors to “green light” a process once appropriate temp and humidity levels are achieved.  Once again, using the plugin architecture, GA was able to tightly integrate the data and events with systems monitoring the rest of the factory keeping track of everything in context of the entire aircraft being built.   These integrations are also part of the Fledge stack today. 

Why did you join LF Edge and what sort of impact do you think LF Edge has on the edge, networking, and IoT industries?

There is no better organization to help govern, build communities and market the benefits of a Linux based OT equivalent of the LAMP stack.

What do you see as the top benefits of being part of the LF Edge community?

Working hand-in-hand with the premier computing, data management and networking companies that share the same passion and vision for open source projects to fundamentally help industrial developers build better machines, plants, factories and businesses.

What sort of contributions has your team made to the community, ecosystem through LF Edge participation?

Dianomic, Google, OSIsoft, industrial system integrators and industrial companies have all contributed to Fledge.  The LF Edge’s project Fledge started when Dianomic contributed the entire FogLAMP stack in winter of 2019.    At that time, the code was in its 8th release and had been commercially deployed in energy, manufacturing and mining operations.  Today, Fledge has ~30,000 commits and averages ~5000 commits/month.

What do you think sets LF Edge apart from other industry alliances?

The Linux Foundation’s history of delivering commercial grade open source software combined with the list of LF Edge membership is simply the best.   Members are serious and passionate about quality open source software, building strong communities and the markets served.

How will LF Edge help your business?

Of course, open source code with Apache 2 licensing is a great start for most software development today.  In Fledge’s case, the code is in its eighth release and deployed in industrial use cases for over a year.   Industrial developers can have more features, faster time to market and higher quality as their starting point!

 

Additionally, contributing FogLAMP to the Fledge project under LF Edge governance adds extra assurance and insurance for the developer.   They can feel confident in their decision to use and contribute to Fledge knowing the LF is backing the project and they remain in control of their own destiny with no cloud or other vendor locks.

What advice would you give to someone considering joining LF Edge?

Open Source is new to manufacturers and manufacturing is new to the Linux Foundation. So, the Fledge community consists of manufacturers, industrial equipment suppliers, integrators, OT system suppliers and technology suppliers.    Join us – help us, help you accelerate Industrial 4.0 adoption. It’s going to be fun!

To learn more about Fledge, visit the project page here.

 

 

 

 

January 30, 2020

LF Edge in 2020: Looking back and Revving forward

By Akraino Edge Stack, Baetyl, Blog, EdgeX Foundry, Fledge, Home Edge, Open Glossary of Edge Computing, Project EVE

Written by Melissa Evers-Hood, LF Edge Governing Board Chair 

Dear Community,

Happy New Year! As we kick off 2020, I wanted to send a note of thanks and recognition to each of you for a wonderful 2019, which marked several meaningful accomplishments for this organization.  LF Edge was launched in Jan 2019 with an aim to unify the edge communities across IOT, Telco, Enterprise and Cloud providing aligned open source edge frameworks for Infrastructure and Applications.

Our accomplishments include:

  • EdgeX Foundry has blossomed this year in participation, downloads, and use cases. EdgeX, as folks commonly call it, also graduated to Impact project stage and surpassed 1.5 million container downloads in 2019.
  • Akraino, which also reached Impact stage this year, is preparing for it’s second release with 5 new blueprints for R2, with updates to 9 of the existing 10 R1 blueprints already released. Most notably, its broadening its blueprint profile to include new blueprints for Connected Vehicles and AR/VR, truly becoming a viable framework across edge applications.
  • At the Growth Stage, Open Glossary provides common terminology and ecosystem mapping for the complex Edge environment. In 2019, the Glossary Project shipped 2.0 of the Glossary, which was integrated into the 2020 State of the Edge Report. The Glossary Project began the process of helping to standardize terminology across all LF Edge projects, and also launched the LF Edge Landscape Project: https://landscape.lfedge.org/.
  • Also at the Growth Stage, Project Eve allows cloud-native development practices in IOT and edge applications. EVE’s most recent release, 4.5.1 (which was gifted on December 25, 2019), provides a brand new initramfs based installer, ACRN tech preview, and ARM/HiKey support.
  • The Home Edge project, targeted to enable a home edge computing framework, announced their Baobab release in November. The Home Edge Project has initiated cross-project collaboration with EdgeX Foundry (secure data storage) and Project EVE (containerized OS).
  • We also added 2 additional projects this year.
    • Baetyl which provides an open source edge computing platform.
    • Fledge which is an open source framework and community for the industrial edge focused on critical operations, predictive maintenance, situational awareness and safety. Fledge has recently begun cross-project collaboration with Project EVE and Akraino, with more information available here.
  • Our reach has broadened with 9k articles, almost 50k new users, and 6.7M social media impressions.

I am excited about the work ahead in 2020, especially as we celebrate our one year anniversary this month. We laid the foundation last year – offered a solution to unite the various edge communities – and now, with your support and contributions, we’re ready to move to the next phase.

LF Edge is co-hosting Open Networking & Edge Summit in April and our teams are working hard on several cross-project demos and solutions. We’re planning meetups and other F2F opportunities at the show, so this conference will be a must.

Our focus as a community will be to continue to expand our developers and end users.  We will do this through having agile communities, that collaborate openly, create secure, updateable, production ready code, and work together as one. We also expect that there will be new projects to join and integrate.  As we walk into this bright future, working as a unified body will demonstrate that the fastest path to Edge products is through LF Edge.

I look forward to working with each of you in ‘20 and seeing you in Los Angeles this April at ONES!

Melissa

January 21, 2020
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