1. The Brownfield Factory Challenge
Most profitable factories run on heavy machinery that is five to twenty years old. While those CNC machines, presses, and packaging lines are mechanically sound, their operational data is trapped inside isolated industrial PLCs and machine controllers or recorded manually on shift clipboards.
Plant owners are often told they must buy brand-new machinery or expensive proprietary cloud licenses to get live production visibility. Astrake takes a practical engineering approach: we retrofit non-intrusive edge gateways onto your existing control panels during scheduled shift handovers.
2. Safe, Read-Only PLC Telemetry Extraction
When connecting to an active production line, safety and stability come first:
- Galvanically Isolated Interfaces: Optical and electrical isolation protects the PLC bus from any external voltage spikes.
- Read-Only Polling Envelopes: For production monitoring, our edge gateways read register states (cycle count, spindle load, fault codes, temperature) without writing to safety-critical machine logic.
- Zero Cloud Dependency on the Shop Floor: Plant floor screens and supervisor tablets connect directly to the local plant server, ensuring instant updates even if external internet fails.
"You cannot improve what you only measure at the end of the month. Live shift visibility turns hidden micro-stoppages into recovered production capacity."
Astrake Industrial Automation Practice
3. Paper Shift Logs vs. Live Plant Telemetry
Replacing manual shift tallies with automated machine telemetry gives plant managers and directors accurate, unbiased data:
| Plant Metric | Manual Clipboard Shift Logs | Astrake Live PLC Telemetry |
|---|---|---|
| Downtime Reason Accuracy | Estimated by operator at end of shift | Exact timestamp and PLC fault code captured |
| Micro-Stoppages (1 to 3 mins) | Almost never recorded manually | Automatically totaled and ranked by cause |
| Energy Cost per Batch | Calculated monthly from utility bill | Measured per machine and per production batch |
| Management Visibility | Next-day Excel summary | Live plant-floor and executive web dashboard |
4. On-Site Plant Assessment and Commissioning
Our engineers visit your facility to inspect existing PLC models, wiring diagrams, and shift workflows, delivering a working pilot on one production line before scaling across the entire plant.