News & Deep Dives on the Industrial Internet of Things
Maintained by employees and friends of Alpamayo, this blog aims to demystify the Industrial Internet of Things and foster the exchange of ideas and best practices among practitioners.
Why We Built a Chocolate Factory — And What It Proves About Industry 4.0
Smart factory solutions are invisible until they're built. So we built a live chocolate factory with 78 machines to make the value of connected manufacturing tangible.
Bridging the Gap — How to Connect Your ERP System to a Unified Namespace
Most companies can get machines talking to a UNS. The real challenge? Getting ERP data into the picture. Here's how to build that bridge without breaking your transactional systems.
We Put a Factory on the Internet. It Was Found in Minutes.
We ran a decoy Swiss metalworking shop on the open internet for 30 days. 24,831 machines scanned it, almost none human. What it means for any factory going online.
Asset Models: A Namespace and KPIs You Can Trust
Message contracts keep a single message honest. The rung above is the asset model — named, versioned asset types an asset declares it implements and the platform validates, defined as code in the customer's repo, so a KPI like availability means one thing across the whole fleet.
i3X — A Manufacturing Standard Small Enough to Survive
CESMII's i3X promises a single API for contextualised manufacturing data. We were skeptical, but its smallness is what makes it credible. Here's why we added it to PREKIT and what we still don't know.
Schematic and Semantic Data Contracts: Governing Communication in the UNS
A Unified Namespace says nothing about what your messages mean. The fix is two data contracts shipped as code — a schematic layer that keeps the wire safe and a semantic layer that fixes meaning — so a standardized message means the same thing across every line and every site.
Setting Standards: Governance that distinguishes the UNS from a Data Swamp
A Unified Namespace gives you one place to put every data point — which is exactly how it becomes a data swamp if nothing governs what the data means. The difference between a namespace you can build on and a swamp is a standard you actually enforce.
How a Built-in Auth Server Keeps You Out of Integration Hell
Industrial platforms need authentication for many services. Registering each one in the customer's IdP creates weeks of delay and a maintenance nightmare. There's a better way.
Secure Remote Access for Machines — With Headscale and WireGuard
How we make edge devices reachable worldwide — without open ports, without cloud dependency.
