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

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Cirrus Link Solutions - MQTT and Sparkplug software that connects OT to IT and cloud systems. Visit: https://unpluggediiot.com/go/cirrus-link