An I2C based architecture for monitoring legacy manufacturing equipment

The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) has the potential to improve manufacturing through increased productivity and decreased costs by collecting, processing, and acting upon process data. Recent manufacturing equipment can provide the necessary data needed by IIoT, but most legacy machines cannot. This severely limits IIoT implementation since most production machines are legacy equipment. To overcome this limitation, this paper describes a low-cost architecture based upon the Inter-Integrated Circuit (I2C) communication protocol that can support IIoT systems by collecting data from sensors placed on legacy equipment. The proposed system is designed, fabricated, and validated on a horizontal band saw.