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

This episode is brought to you by Cirrus Link Solutions and Canary Labs.

Cirrus Link: https://unpluggediiot.com/go/cirrus-link

Canary Labs: https://unpluggediiot.com/go/canary-labs

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Arlen Nipper — MQTT co-inventor and President & CTO of Cirrus Link Solutions — returns for his third appearance on Unplugged.

Twenty-five years after co-inventing MQTT to connect an oil pipeline over a satellite link in the Middle East, Arlen walks through the current state of the protocol: 15 million tags in a single deployment at millisecond SLAs, a UNS market that has grown to $2B+, and why data centre operators are choosing MQTT 3.1.1 over MQTT 5.

Topics covered:

- The UNS market arc: from cryptic tags to $2B+ and what changed

- 15 million tags at a 3-second SLA: report-by-exception at scale

- Nextera Energy: 524 solar, BESS and wind sites in one Remote Operations Centre

- How data centres became AI factories — and why MQTT won

- A large customer's white paper rejecting MQTT 5 entirely

- The AI + UNS framework: decouple, define the UDT, train AI on the live feed

- Sparkplug v4: alarms over MQTT and event pipelines

- The ProveIt! Lifetime Award and the NVIDIA acceptance speech

- ICC 2026: what to expect from the AI-first year

Guest: Arlen Nipper — President & CTO, Cirrus Link Solutions | MQTT co-inventor

Episode page: https://unpluggediiot.com/episodes/ep-60-mqtt-sparkplug-unified-namespace

Chapters:

00:00 Introduction

05:00 Co-inventing MQTT in 1999

12:00 From cryptic tags to $2B+: the UNS market

18:00 15 million tags at a 3-second SLA

25:00 Nextera Energy: 524 sites in one ops centre

32:00 Data centres become AI factories

40:00 AI + UNS: the single source of truth

47:00 Sparkplug v4: alarms over MQTT

52:00 MQTT 3.1.1 vs MQTT 5

57:00 The ProveIt! Lifetime Award

61:00 ICC 2026

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Cirrus Link Solutions: https://unpluggediiot.com/go/cirrus-link

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This episode is brought to you by Canary Labs, and Cirrus Link.

Canary Labs — The industrial historian platform that captures your plant and process data the moment it's generated and makes it instantly accessible across your entire operation.

Learn more: https://unpluggediiot.com/go/canary-labs

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Phil Seboa and Ed Fuentes sit down with Kyle Van Eenennaam (BW Design Group) to explore what it actually looks like to work at every level of the Ignition ecosystem.

Kyle has taught Ignition at Inductive Automation, presented at ICC, and now builds systems at BW Design Group. In this conversation, he maps the four types of organisations in the Ignition world, walks through the history of industrial automation from IR1 to Industry 5.0, and gives a practical guide to learning Ignition from scratch in 2026 — including what Ignition 8.3, Git integration, and AI tools are changing for SCADA engineers.

Topics covered:

• The four Ignition ecosystem buckets: integrators, end users, consultants, IA/partners

• Kyle's journey from IA support and training to ICC presenter to BW Design Group

• The cold call that turned into a full Ignition transformation

• A brief history of industrial automation: IR1 to Industry 5.0

• How to learn Ignition in 2026 — install first, use the Design Challenge, build with the designer

• Ignition 8.3 and Git: managing the full gateway in version control

• What CI/CD really looks like for SCADA teams starting small

• AI in Ignition development: MCP servers, automated commits, and the dream of closed-loop delivery

• CSS, Perspective, and what Kyle is learning next

Guest:

• Kyle Van Eenennaam — BW Design Group

Resources:

• How to Learn Ignition From Scratch: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1U-QOARK7izqJnXgIr6ITT3ysxw9usIrxsKCHQhJX_dc

• ICC 2025 presentation: https://inductiveautomation.com/resources/icc/2025/history-of-industry-from-00-to-50

Episode page: https://unpluggediiot.com/episodes/ep-59-every-seat-ignition-table

Chapters:

00:00 Introduction

02:00 The four buckets of the Ignition ecosystem

08:30 Kyle's career journey

10:00 The aha moment

14:00 History of Industrial Automation: IR1 to Industry 5.0

23:00 Learning Ignition from scratch in 2026

31:00 Ignition 8.3 and Git

36:00 CI/CD for SCADA

43:00 AI in Ignition

48:00 Phil's prediction

50:00 CSS and what's next

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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