Industrial IoT Development

Machines speak Modbus; the cloud speaks HTTP. A gateway — in my work, a Raspberry Pi — sits between them: it polls configured registers from connected machines on an interval, timestamps the readings, and publishes them to an MQTT broker, which is built for constrained devices and unreliable site networks in a way HTTP is not.

From there the readings are decoupled from the web application by a queue, RabbitMQ in my work, so a burst of messages or a slow consumer does not lose data. Workers validate and normalise every payload — device input is treated as untrusted, the same as any external request — before it reaches PostgreSQL and is exposed through an API that a dashboard reads for machine health, alerts and asset tracking.

This is the part of full-stack development most web-only developers never touch: the edge device, the industrial protocol, and the gap between a sensor reading and a chart on a screen. It is also where a device fault has to be told apart from an application fault when a dashboard goes quiet.