The TrakHound Project

The TrakHound Project is a project aimed to provide access to the Industrial Internet Of Things (IIOT) through an open source framework, open source tools and applications.

This project is separated into multiple Parts with Part 1 being focused on Accessing Device Data which was released in February 2022. Other parts of the project will be introduced in approximately two month intervals totaling four parts leading up to IMTS (International Manufacturing Technology Show) 2022.

The overall goal of this project is to provide a clear roadmap, along with tools to implement that roadmap, for companies looking to implement IIOT concepts. Being open source allows for small companies that are not ready to make large investments in IIOT yet to have access to a fully functioning IIOT framework, as well as large companies looking to develop their own IIOT tools who are looking for a framework to build upon.

Part 1

Access Device Data

Part 1 of the TrakHound Project is to access device data. This is accomplished by implementing and expanding the use cases of the MTConnect® standard.

For Part 1, we developed an entirely new MTConnect Agent from scratch using .NET and we have rethought the entire implementation of MTConnect from the Adapters to the Agent. By using our new MTConnect.NET library, we can now develop Agents with a wide range of configurations to fit any use cases. Whether it is a traditional Agent using an Adapter and an Agent, an embedded Agent (removing the need for an Adapter), or using the Agent to access cloud data using either an Http REST interface or an MQTT interface.

These tools make it possible to integrate MTConnect into existing IOT tools such as those on AWS or Azure.

All of these tools and the Agents are open source and provided free of charge to the manufacturing community.

Links to download these applications and libraries are below and more information can be found on our GitHub page.

Part 2

Data Storage (coming early April 2022)

Part 2 of the TrakHound Project is to store data in a simple, flexible, and standard way. We are fine tuning our solution to this and will be releasing it in the coming weeks.