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Beckhoff TwinCAT is one of the most widely deployed PLC platforms in industrial automation. ADS, its native communication protocol, gives you direct read and write access to PLC variables without additional licensing or middleware, and connecting from FlowFuse means tapping into that same channel TwinCAT uses internally.

FlowFuse 2.28 focuses on making your day-to-day work faster and giving you more control — whether you are debugging a flow, managing edge devices, or running FlowFuse on your own infrastructure.

There is a slide that lives in almost every industrial AI project deck.

On the left: data collection, model training, validation. On the right: operational value, reduced downtime, optimized throughput. In the middle, a small box labeled "deployment" that nobody in the room questions, because everyone has already moved on to the numbers on the right.

Somewhere in your IIoT pipeline, a message just failed. You don't know which one. You don't know when. And unless you have a Dead Letter Queue, you never will.

The bus factor is a simple idea. If one person leaves your team, how much breaks? If the answer is "a lot," your bus factor is one. Most integration systems have a bus factor of one.

The model is the easy part. I know that is not what you were told. But it is true, and somewhere between your third deployment and your first production fire, you will stop arguing with it.

An MQTT to InfluxDB is one of the most common and most critical pipelines in IIoT. Every timestamped telemetry event that drives decisions on the floor needs to land somewhere it can be queried, trended, and acted on.

Bearing wear, shaft misalignment, and imbalance don't appear overnight. They develop over days or weeks, leaving a clear trail in vibration data long before any audible or thermal symptoms emerge. By the time a technician hears grinding or feels heat, the window for low-cost intervention has already closed.

If you work with vehicles, industrial automation, or embedded systems, you've likely encountered CAN bus, the communication backbone that connects ECUs, sensors, controllers, and actuators in real-world environments. The challenge isn't just reading CAN data; it's getting that data into your dashboards, cloud platforms, databases, or industrial control systems.

FlowFuse 2.27 tightens the development loop for Remote instances and makes FlowFuse Expert more aware of what is actually running in your Node-RED environment. It also improves availability for High Availability hosted deployments.

Nearly 99% of the requests your manufacturing systems make return the same answer: nothing changed. The 1% that matter? You find out too late. This isn't a monitoring problem. It's an architecture problem.

Your industrial AI initiative is dying. Maybe it's already dead.

Most manufacturing facilities run MTConnect agents on their CNC machines, but the XML data these agents produce isn't directly usable. You receive streams of timestamped measurements, state changes, and condition flags wrapped in hierarchical XML structures. Converting this into a functional dashboard means solving three problems: retrieving the data reliably, parsing it correctly, and routing specific values to the right display components.

The MQTT vs CoAP debate is mostly noise. One protocol assumes you have infrastructure and want centralized coordination. The other assumes you don't and can't. If you're still debating which is "better," you haven't measured what matters.

OPC UA servers store everything. Finding anything takes hours.

Modbus is 47 years old and has no built-in security. By every measure, it should have been obsolete a decade ago. OPC UA, EtherNet/IP, MQTT, Profinet: modern protocols with semantic modeling, encryption, and real-time capabilities arrived backed by billions in vendor investment and industry standardization efforts.

The question itself is broken.

MQTT moves messages. OPC UA defines meaning. They operate at different layers of the stack. Comparing them is like comparing TCP to JSON.