Clovis Community College Puts Industry 4.0 Into The Hands Of Students & Teachers

Next to the robotic arms, the off-the-shelf miniature smart homes may not appear to be a key part of Clovis Community College’s Automation, Robotics & Mechatronics lab, but this unassuming hardware is providing students and instructors alike with a unique opportunity to build industry-grade automation applications.

Located in Fresno, California, Clovis Community College is well-regarded for its high transfer rate to four-year institutions. Now, by incorporating Ignition into its curriculum, Clovis is giving students in its Automation, Robotics & Mechatronics program the tools to develop a multifaceted skillset suited to both future higher-learning endeavors and local industry.

Project Development

Matthew Graff, Instructor of Automation, Robotics & Mechatronics at Clovis, was approached by a colleague from Texas A&M University about a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to train high school and college students, as well as instructors, about technology related to the Fourth Industrial Revolution. And, unlike programs that are only able to offer exposure to these concepts, this NSF funding would allow Graff to pay his student researchers.

Graff developed what has been dubbed the “Industry 4.0 Project.” The idea was simple: combine Inductive Automation’s Ignition software — an industrial automation platform for SCADA, HMI, IIoT, and more — with accessible hardware so that students could see immediate real-world results and be inspired to pursue careers in automation.

While developing this curriculum, Graff took inspiration from Walker Reynolds' idea of creating a Unified Namespace (UNS) using a Raspberry Pi. “The idea of using really cheap hardware, Raspberry Pi and Arduinos, to run industrial software made a lot of sense for us in the project,” said Graff. “​​We wanted something that would be very much hands-on.”

There was just one problem — Graff had no background in working with Raspberry Pis, so he reached out to Bill Kerney, Computer Science Instructor at Clovis. While Kerney describes himself as “not an Ignition user,” his expertise with Linux provided a complementary skillset. “My role here was as an advisor,” he said. “I was here to supervise the student workers on the project, and so when they got stuck figuring out how to do something, then it was my job to unstick them.”

Educational Engagement Program

While Graff had an easy time acquiring the hardware for the project, budgetary constraints prevented him from purchasing full Ignition licenses. Originally, the labs used Ignition in free trial mode, resetting the license every two hours.

When Graff, who has had frustrating experiences with other software companies, learned about Inductive Automation’s Educational Engagement Program (EEP), he sent an email without expecting much, but was surprised to receive a prompt response. “I just got on the website and said, ‘Hey, I'm interested,’ and within a week, we were talking, person to person,” Graff said. Beyond the licenses, the EEP connected him with experts at Inductive Automation to ensure the Industry 4.0 Project met industry standards.

Graff felt his experience was based on a shared ethos. “There's an understanding from Inductive Automation that there's a need to train employees, and they see us as partners,” he said.

Industry 4.0 Project

In the Industry 4.0 Project, students develop an Ignition system that controls a miniature Keyestudio IoT smart home through a combination of a Raspberry Pi and ESP32 Arduinos. Students first set up an MQTT broker using Cirrus Link’s MQTT Transmission Module, which they connect to their edge devices, meaning the smart homes. Next, students establish a UNS, following the ISA-95 standard, to connect to the MQTT broker. Once all the edge devices are publishing to the specific topics, students use the MQTT Engine Module to subscribe to those topics and bring the data into Ignition, creating tags. With these tags, students can build Perspective views and dashboards to display the real-time data.

The system is built in Perspective, meaning that when Graff gives demonstrations for high school students, he can have the class scan a QR code to gain immediate access to the application through their phones, upending the typical “no phones in class” rule. As Graff sees it, “I think a lot of times, there's the difficulty of how we make technology used for a positive thing.”

And with the combination of Ignition and smart homes, the positive results arrive quickly. “They can open up the box and hopefully within a class period, 45 minutes or an hour, have something working. They're pushing buttons and seeing responses. And so in that, immediately, they're learning some basic things like setup, using the Unified Namespace,” said Graff.

The collegiate counterparts replace the Raspberry Pi with more professional hardware, courtesy of Opto 22. The combination of Ignition and Opto 22’s groov RIO has been inspiring to the Clovis students. “Computer science majors oftentimes will live in this sort of platonic world of ideals and algorithms that are very abstract,” said Kerney. “Getting them to actually turn a motor on or to turn a light on or to open a door is oftentimes just a mind-blowing experience for them.”

Julian Laxamana, a student researcher working on the Industry 4.0 Project, found the ability to bring his programming into a tangible realm extremely gratifying. “It's really easy to have all your data in one place, which is really nuanced because if you make it by scratch, you have to have each computer send data, and you have to get it to show up on some GUI, which is really hard to get set up. But Ignition makes that a lot easier to link up all the data from the sensors to the computer,” said Laxamana.

Laxamana, who had no previous Ignition experience, also integrated the Ignition system with a camera that analyzes its video feed in (almost) real time. “We currently use YOLOv8 to collect data from ESP32 cameras, process it through the Raspberry Pi, and then display it on a web page, which Ignition gets the data from.”

Graff, who has strived to make the Industry 4.0 Project a “student-centered teaching system,” was ecstatic to see his student taking initiative with Ignition, saying, “I just showed Julian a few things. And then the next thing I know, he's brought a video in with object detection that's run on another application.”

Kerney agrees that it’s exciting to see Ignition acting as a catalyst for students. “Most computer science majors, if you told them, ‘Make a smart house that the door opens and closes,’ and has all these sensors, they won't even know where to begin, but with Ignition in it they were able to get this whole system up and running in a pretty fast amount of time.”

Transition To Industry

Entering its second year, the Industry 4.0 Project has already led to real-world success for students.

Gurkaran Singh, a student worker at Clovis studying industrial automation, was one of the main driving forces behind the Industry 4.0 Project, but most of his experience came from working on the project itself. “Before I came to Clovis, I had limited experience in industrial automation. I had only done one PLC programming class, and I had never heard about MQTT or SCADA or Ignition,” said Singh.

Even without prior Ignition experience, between free resources like Inductive University and the Ignition user manual, Singh quickly discovered the breadth of functionality he could develop in the platform. “One thing I really liked about Ignition early on was how easy it was to download and set up on my own personal computer, to begin learning,” he said.

To gain a better understanding of the groov product line, Graff and Singh traveled to Opto 22’s headquarters in Temecula for a four-day training course. During the training, Singh learned about Farm Data Systems (FDS), an integrator specializing in agricultural automation and monitoring, utilizing a combination of Ignition and Opto 22 hardware. FDS uses its Water Informatics product to monitor and control irrigation for thousands of sites. “With Ignition, we've been able to really turn the corner for our customers in terms of giving them many systems and features that they've never had access to before. It's been quite revolutionary for our growers,” said John Williamson, President of FDS.

What piqued Singh’s interest was that FDS’ office was located in Madera, about a 40-minute drive from Clovis’ campus. With guidance from Graff, Singh emailed Williamson, expressing his interest in a job and citing his experience working with Ignition and Opto 22 products in the Industry 4.0 Project. Williamson was impressed and offered Singh a position, saying, “His career objectives were very much in line with what we were doing. So we met in person, and I already knew he could add value on day one. His training at college was really so well suited to the work we're doing here.”

Even in his first few months of employment, Singh is already helping Williamson to design Ignition interfaces based on customer requirements, configure PLCs, and build panels for field deployment in addition to daily concerns like alerts from customer sites. “My day to day over at Farm Data Systems includes configuring Opto 22 products for upcoming projects, monitoring alarms for the products that are already out in the field, trying to troubleshoot any networking issues that we face, and trying to help customers solve those problems,” said Singh.

“It's been really a remarkable experience for us to work with Ignition,” said Williamson. “The product that we bring to the market is just leaps and bounds ahead of anything anybody else can provide to help farmers do their job.”

Real-World Skills

The Industry 4.0 Project helps students build a foundation based on technical experience and critical thinking skills that are so vital in industry. Troubleshooting, in particular, can be the crux of any real-world system. “What we realized with this project is automatically just connecting a bunch of things using standard industrial protocols for Ethernet, there's a bunch of troubleshooting that has to happen even if everything's working,” said Graff.

The combination of software and hardware gives students the space to learn what to do when a system doesn’t work, which can be more valuable long term. “Using hardware, you have the opportunity to make more mistakes. It may be a wiring issue or it could be a software issue such as setting an incorrect IP address. It helps you gain a deeper understanding of the whole system,” said Singh.

Additionally, the project puts many of the automation and computer science concepts taught at Clovis into the context of a complete system. “While working in industrial automation, at some point, you're gonna come across a problem where you need to integrate different devices, using different communication protocols,” said Singh. “Ignition is a really useful tool, in bringing all those different devices from different protocols together and utilizing that data to store, analyze, and generate some useful insights, and even building HMI displays for control.”

“I see Ignition as being a Rosetta Stone, and that's how I describe it to students where it can translate and connect all kinds of components together in a factory,” said Graff.

Sharing This Knowledge

Over the past year, the Industry 4.0 Project has expanded to five other colleges and 10 high schools, with plans to include five additional colleges and seven more high schools in the coming year. For Graff, sharing the project with other schools is about reaching the next generation of engineers. “A lot of high school students don't realize there's jobs related to industrial automation, and they could go into the engineering or computer science pathway,” he said.

“We've had three software engineers working on this project. The first one, Neiro Cabrera, worked on this for about a year and then he transferred to UCLA and then he just recently messaged me and told me that he got a job in a related industry,” said Kerney. “An absolute success story. He worked on this. He got experience in it. He found he loved it.”

This sense of discovery is a sentiment that Singh echoes. “When I first joined the industrial automation program here at Clovis Community College, my career goal was to be on the plant floor,” he said. “Working with this project has exposed me to newer and emerging technologies and broadened my horizon and opened me to a lot more opportunities within the field.”

Clovis does not want to gatekeep this knowledge or technology. In an effort to increase the accessibility of the project, Graff and Kerney set up a Github page that details the hardware and software requirements for the project, along with instructions for configuring components as well as lab exercises and training materials. “We want to share everything we have here,” said Graff. “You can take this and use it in a classroom. Or if you're just someone that wants to have a fun automation project, maybe before you hook up your whole home to be a smart home, you can just get a little $55 home from Amazon and pay $100 for a Raspberry Pi, and you'll be set to go.”

Transcript:

0:00:11.5
Matthew Graff: I'm Matthew Graff. I work here at Clovis Community College. I'm an Instructor of Automation, Robotics, Mechatronics. What we do here in the lab is teach students on industrial automation. So a few years ago, I got contacted from a professor at Texas A&M if I wanted to be involved in a National Science Foundation project. And the project was focusing on training technicians in the Fourth Industrial Revolution. So when the grant was awarded, I let my computer science colleague know that there was a position that he could work on this grant with me. The reason I brought the computer science department in is I had no background in working with something like a Raspberry Pi and so I needed that expertise. We brought in multiple student workers over time and they assisted in getting Ignition on the Raspberry Pi, getting the system working, stuff that a computer science student could do pretty easily, but it was just not the background that myself or students in industrial automation program normally have.

0:01:16.3
Bill Kerney: My name is Bill Kerney. I am an Instructor of Computer Science here at Clovis Community College. I've been working on this project for about two years now. My role here was as an advisor. I was here to supervise the student workers on the project. And so, when they got stuck figuring out how to do something, then it was my job to unstick them.

0:01:35.1
Matthew Graff: We are training high school teachers and college instructors on the Fourth Industrial Revolution system or Industry 4.0 Project. And so what we do is we show the students how to initialize the system and then do some troubleshooting. I've been very impressed working with the Educational Engagement Program with Inductive Automation. Just from the get go, I just got on the website and said, "Hey, I'm interested." And within a week, we were talking person to person going, "Hey, this is what we're trying to do, what we need to accomplish." From there they were able to connect us with others in Inductive Automation to help with the project and give some feedback so that we would be doing stuff to industrial standards.

0:02:17.9
Julian Laxamana: My name is Julian Laxamana. I'm currently a Student Researcher here at Clovis Community College working on the Industry 4.0 Project. I work with the Raspberry Pis and Arduinos to collect data from smart homes and display it on the Ignition webpage.

0:02:31.7
Gurkaran Singh: My name is Gurkaran Singh. I'm a student here at Clovis Community College studying industrial automation. I'm also a student employee. My main focus with the project is to establish MQTT connections between the edge devices and the Ignition SCADA.

0:02:51.1
Matthew Graff: We're focusing a lot on using what Walker Reynolds called a Unified Namespace. And we're using MQTT to move the data around. As we build out the system, we wanted something that literally for around $200 of hardware, someone could learn and experience how to use Ignition. It goes down to just a really simple smart home that they're programming and setting up and configuring a Namespace for. The visualization is a big part. And so, we're using Perspective. One fun story was I was at a high school and I could see the teacher walking around telling students, they're secretly pulling their cell phones out and telling them put away. I turned around and said, "Hey, here's the address. Connect to this and you can connect into the system." And so then they had Perspective running on their phone.

0:03:45.7
Julian Laxamana: We're having the Raspberry Pi run Ignition on a terminal. And then the Arduinos connect the MQTT broker through Namespace and it sends the data through there. And you can connect through your phone or laptop and see the data from the Arduinos, which is really cool. This is the Ignition webpage to control the smart home for this smart home here. So you can set the LED color like here, and then set the yellow LED here, and there's a little door on it.

0:04:19.3
Gurkaran Singh: Basically, we're using Ignition as a MQTT broker, using the MQTT Distributor Module as the broker. And then, we're connecting all the edge devices, which are our smart homes, to the broker, and that's how we're getting the data into Ignition. Once we've got the tags in Ignition, I go ahead and create the UDTs and once they're on, I build the Perspective views. Once we've got the edge devices configured and publishing to the broker, we should be able to see the data come in on the MQTT Engine [Module] on Ignition. So the Namespace that we are using follows a simple structure. We've got a generic name "Smart Company" and then a neighborhood. So for each new neighborhood, we'll increment the number. And for each neighborhood, we've got object detection. You've got smart farms, and then we got smart homes. Under each smart home are all the homes that are currently connected and publishing data. And these are all the tags that are being published. These tags are being used on here on this Perspective view displaying the data such as count, humidity, temperature, and there is some data coming in. The push buttons got motion and there's a touch. We could switch the homes from the smart home number.

0:05:36.0
Gurkaran Singh: This dropdown auto-updates each time a new home disconnects or connects. For troubleshooting the MQTT communications, I use MQTT Explorer connecting to the broker. It's really easy to see all the data come in and confirm that the homes that are actually connected we are able to receive that data on the broker.

0:05:58.8
Matthew Graff: We also didn't want people to have the view that this is just like using cheap off-the-shelf toys and it has nothing related to industrial products. So what we did is we looked out and tried to find a product that would be similar that's being used in industry. We located Opto 22. They have a single board Linux system and we've used that for our college level systems. So we are giving institutions, through our grant, those Opto 22s and they're able to experience both working with cheap system that they could easily buy for a whole classroom, every student, and using industrial system with Opto 22. Having student workers has been helpful because I could see how much they could take on and also discuss with them well, how would we teach other students? Bouncing ideas off of them and trying to create a student-centered approach to teaching. Julian brought a video in from object detection that's run on another application.

0:07:01.1
Julian Laxamana: We currently use YOLOv8 to collect data from ESP32 cameras and then process it through the Raspberry Pi and then that displays it on a webpage, which Ignition gets the data from and displays it on there.

0:07:17.0
Matthew Graff: Working on this project has really exceeded my expectations. Been super impressed with students working at different levels. They generally have brought the project further along than I was able to do just on my own.

0:07:31.2
Gurkaran Singh: Working on this project exposed me to Ignition and Opto 22 and MQTT. I found this local company focused on agricultural monitoring and automation. Their main product was based on Ignition. They were using Opto 22s for their controls and MQTT to transmit all the data. I reached out and expressed my interest and next morning I hear back from the president of the company and my skills aligned with their products, which led me to be able to get a job over there.

0:08:04.1
John Williamson: My name is John Williamson. I am the President of Farm Data Systems. We have about 20 years experience working with farmers to help them improve irrigation management. We've been working with Opto for about eight years now, using their controllers for Ignition. We've been working with them for about six years now, so we've probably done a couple hundred projects already with Ignition. So one of our biggest challenges is building a team of technicians who have capabilities around Ignition and low-voltage electrical systems. But one day Gurkaran contacted us directly, which was really good. We had internships available at the time, but Gurkaran expressed an interest in a full-time position. So I talked to him over the phone and it was very clear his career objectives were very much in line with what we were doing. So we met in-person and I already knew he could add value on day one. His training at college was really so well suited to the work we're doing here. Can't speak highly enough about the program and how well suited it is to our business.

0:09:05.9
Gurkaran Singh: My day to day over at Farm Data System includes configuring Opto 22 products for upcoming projects, monitoring alarms for the products that are already out in the field, trying to troubleshoot any networking issues that we face, and trying to help customers solve those problems. I feel that the skills that I learned working with the Industry 4.0 Project were highly relevant and were really beneficial for me in being able to be successful in my current role.

0:09:38.0
Bill Kerney: We've had software engineers work on this project. The first one, Neiro Cabrera, worked on this for about a year and then he transferred to UCLA and then he just recently messaged me and told me that he got a job in a related industry. So an absolute success story.

0:09:51.5
Julian Laxamana: Working with Ignition and all the software we have now provides a good foundation for me to build other projects in the future.

0:09:58.7
Gurkaran Singh: Learning all these concepts, using hardware as well as software, helped me improve my troubleshooting skills. While using hardware, you have opportunity to make more mistakes. It may be a wiring issue or it could be a software issue such as setting an incorrect IP address. It helps you gain a deeper understanding of the whole system, trying to troubleshoot the issues and fixing the problem.

0:10:24.1
Matthew Graff: Projects really get students excited and so when we use Ignition, we see students, rather than trying to race to the door and leave five minutes early, they stay around for maybe an hour or two extra trying to get their project working.

0:10:42.2
Bill Kerney: One of the things I work on with my students a lot is trying to get them to go out into the real world and interface with the real world. Getting them to actually turn a motor on or to turn a light on or to open a door and things like that is oftentimes just a mind-blowing experience for them.

0:10:56.2
Julian Laxamana: Very cool for students to see their knowledge have a physical effect on the real world.

0:11:01.0
Matthew Graff: I encourage anyone who wants to look at this project go to our GitHub page. This was funded by the National Science Foundation and I just feel like we are obligated and we want to share everything we have here. There's nothing we're hiding, so feel free to use that. You can take this and use it in a classroom, or if you're an engineer and you just wanna poke around, or just someone that wants to have a fun automation project, you can just get a little $55 home from Amazon and pay a $100 for for a Raspberry Pi and you'll be set to go.