Latest trends in machine communication

Vom 16.-18. September 2025 traf sich in Lissabon die europäische Spitzen­gemeinschaft für Soft- und Hard­ware­innovation: die ITEA Project Outline Days. Mit fast 400 Vertreterinnen und Vertretern aus Industrie, Forschung und Politik gelten die PO Days als Taktgeber für die nächsten geförderten ITEA-Forschungs­projekte – und damit als Geburts­stätte für Technologien, die in fünf bis sechs Jahren den Markt prägen werden.

Für Adaept Engineering ist dieser Treffpunkt traditionell mehr als nur ein Pflicht­termin: Hier wurden 2019 die ersten Ideen für das Projekt OPTIMUM geschmiedet, aus dem später unsere heutige Architektur für semantische OPC-UA-Datenmodelle hervorging – ausgezeichnet 2022 mit dem ITEA Award of Excellence. Drei Jahre später sind wir mit demselben Pionier­geist zurückgekehrt.

An old but reliable overhead crane still lifts loads weighing tons every day. His biggest deficit: He doesn't “talk” to the new, digitized processes in the production hall. Does that really mean that a completely new crane has to be purchased? No — says Dr. Arne Wall, co-founder of Adaept Engineering. In the latest Transformation Academy podcast, he explains how retrofitting not only avoids costly new purchases, but also becomes a real lever for sustainability.

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On September 26, 2025, more than 300 decision makers from politics, business and science met for the German-Latvian Business Day at HanseMesse Rostock. For Adaept Engineering, it was a home game with international appeal and an ideal stage to show how standardized machine data lay the foundation for joint innovations between Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and Latvia.

While OPC UA has long been considered the backbone of modern automation in Industry 4.0, the integration of this technology into real microcontroller systems remains the exception. The reason for this lies in an unfortunate combination of severe resource limitations, high timing requirements, and the still limited availability of lean, fully standards-compliant implementations. Many developers therefore still resort to MQTT & Co. with less structured data formats as soon as RAM budgets in the single-digit megabyte range and clock frequencies below 250 MHz come into play.

We have redesigned our website. The aim was to present Adaept Engineering's services in a more modern way, to sharpen our communication and to present our range of services more comprehensively.

Industrial communication is in the midst of rapid change: With OPC UA (Open Platform Communications Unified Architecture), a universal, vendor-independent standard is available that ensures seamless data exchange from the field level to the cloud. The focus is increasingly on the question of how OPC UA can also be implemented on small, resource-limited embedded devices to enable new IIoT applications and Industry 4.0 scenarios.