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Ending communication failures across 180 remote sites

Posted by Janice Colmer on May 20, 2026 9:46:06 AM

New case study explains how Genesee County Drain Commissioner - Water & Waste Services solved their slow radio polling communication problem over 600 square miles.

Communication breakdowns in industrial systems aren’t just frustrating—they’re costly, disruptive, and often difficult to diagnose.

The Genesee County Drain Commissioner Division of Water & Waste Service (GCDC-WWS) in Michigan struggled with the communication slowdowns in their legacy radio polling system. Poor alarming meant operators could not reliably fine-tune the pumping stations. With 180 remote sites across 600 square miles, these delays became unacceptable.

This new case study shows you how they solved the problem.

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Topics: Case studies, Water & wastewater, MQTT, groov EPIC, Sparkplug, MQTT implementation, edge computing, groov RIO

Control Engineering article highlights 3 IIoT case studies

Posted by Janice Colmer on Jan 10, 2023 1:16:01 PM

See how system integrators in water/wastewater, natural gas production, and manufacturing leveraged MQTT and industrial edge devices to securely access and use key data.

If your goal is to get useful data from field devices and legacy systems, you’ve probably found that putting together an IIoT system is complicated, requiring many OT and IT devices, software, and protocols.

But these 3 real-world case studies show how two tools—the MQTT communications protocol and industrial edge devices—can simplify your IIoT project.

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Topics: IIoT, MQTT, cybersecurity, MQTT implementation, edge computing, control engineering

MQTT: Bringing it all together

Posted by Josh Eastburn on Jul 29, 2020 8:45:29 AM

Building industrial MQTT networks at scale with Opto 22 groov devices.

If you've followed this series since the beginning, you should have a good idea of how to set up your groov EPIC or groov RIO for MQTT communication. You also understand the importance of Sparkplug B in building MQTT systems and designing industrial-strength IoT networks.

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Topics: MQTT, groov EPIC, Sparkplug, Ignition, MQTT implementation, groov RIO

MQTT: Mission-critical fault tolerance

Posted by Josh Eastburn on Jun 16, 2020 9:01:50 AM

Our MQTT series continues with a deep dive into groov EPIC’s (and now groov RIO’s) features for high-reliability MQTT networks.

At its heart, MQTT was designed for unreliable networks. Back in the ’90s, ConocoPhillips (now Phillips 66) was looking for a way to improve telemetry reporting over its low-bandwidth dial-up and costly VSAT (small satellite dish) SCADA network. IBM partnered with system integrator Arcom Control Systems (now Cirrus Link Solutions) to develop a minimalist communication protocol that could gracefully handle intermittent network outages and high latency among many distributed devices over TCP/IP.

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Topics: Node-RED, MQTT, Ignition Edge, groov EPIC, groov Manage, Sparkplug, MQTT implementation, groov RIO

MQTT: Faster, better with Sparkplug B

Posted by Josh Eastburn on Feb 18, 2020 3:30:40 PM

In part 2 of our series, we look at how to set up groov Manage and Ignition Edge for publishing with Sparkplug B payloads.

MQTT is the darling of enterprise IoT because of its efficiency, simplicity, and flexibility, which makes it ideal for use in applications that communicate with resource-constrained edge-of-network devices. After being nurtured for years within IBM, and incorporated into their smart energy, health, and utilities solutions, MQTT has become the chosen messaging protocol across all the major cloud IoT platforms as well as highly scalable applications, like Facebook Messenger.

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Topics: Node-RED, MQTT, Ignition Edge, groov EPIC, groov Manage, Sparkplug, MQTT implementation

MQTT: Basic publishing with groov EPIC

Posted by Josh Eastburn on Jan 8, 2020 8:35:33 AM

Wondering how to implement MQTT with groov EPIC? Follow along with this series, starting with basic string publishing.

Ever since ‘00, when the next year rolls around I think, “Welcome to the future!” Every year it feels much truer, and how could 2020 be any less? (UPDATE: 🤦) I’m excited about what we have planned for you this year. Among other things, we’re upping our commitment to MQTT in a big way. Stay tuned for announcements on that in the coming months.

For the moment, though, I want to address the current feature set groov EPIC offers for MQTT, the lightweight pub-sub communication protocol for IoT. With so many ways to do it—via groov Manage, Node-RED, or Ignition Edge—you may be wondering which, if any, is right for your application. In this series, I’m going to look at different scenarios where you might want to use MQTT, then show you how to get started.

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Topics: Node-RED, MQTT, EPIC, groov EPIC, groov Manage, MQTT implementation

OptoBlog

Ending communication failures across 180 remote sites

New case study explains how Genesee County Drain Commissioner - Water & Waste Services solved their slow radio polling communication problem over 600 square miles.

Control Engineering article highlights 3 IIoT case studies

See how system integrators in water/wastewater, natural gas production, and manufacturing leveraged MQTT and industrial edge devices to securely access and use key data.

MQTT: Bringing it all together

Building industrial MQTT networks at scale with Opto 22 groov devices.

MQTT: Mission-critical fault tolerance

Our MQTT series continues with a deep dive into groov EPIC’s (and now groov RIO’s) features for high-reliability MQTT networks.

MQTT: Faster, better with Sparkplug B

In part 2 of our series, we look at how to set up groov Manage and Ignition Edge for publishing with Sparkplug B payloads.

MQTT: Basic publishing with groov EPIC

Wondering how to implement MQTT with groov EPIC? Follow along with this series, starting with basic string publishing.

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