EmberBurn
Multi-protocol industrial IoT gateway and data simulator.
Category: Connectivity
What it does
- Runs an OPC UA server that serves simulated or bridged tag data to any OPC UA client.
- Publishes the same tag data simultaneously to every enabled output, all from one source. Fifteen are available, and every one of them runs.
- Simulates realistic tag behaviour with sine waves, random walks, incrementing counters, and static values, each carrying types, units, engineering ranges, and descriptions.
The fifteen publishers
Twelve of them put tag data onto a wire:
| Publisher | What it does |
|---|---|
| OPC UA Server | Serves tags to any OPC UA client. The core of the app. |
| OPC UA Client | Pushes tag values to another OPC UA server, for bridging two of them |
| MQTT | Publishes to any MQTT broker |
| Sparkplug B | Appears as a native Sparkplug edge node with birth and death certificates, consumable by Ignition Edge on the same cluster |
| REST API | HTTP endpoints for tag read and write |
| GraphQL | A query interface over the tag set |
| Apache Kafka | Enterprise event streaming |
| AMQP | Message queuing against RabbitMQ or compatible |
| WebSocket | Real-time push to browsers |
| Modbus TCP | Legacy PLC and SCADA integration, with tags mapped to registers |
| InfluxDB | Writes directly to a time-series database |
| Prometheus | Exposes an operational metrics endpoint |
The remaining three are counted as publishers by the app because they sit on the same pipeline, though they don't speak a protocol:
| Publisher | What it does |
|---|---|
| Alarms | Evaluates threshold rules and notifies by email, Slack, or SMS |
| SQLite Persistence | Local tag history and audit logging that survives a restart |
| Data Transformation | Unit conversion, scaling, and computed tags, so downstream systems receive values in the form they expect |
Publishers are opt-in through configuration, and each runs in its own thread, so one failing doesn't take the others down. Enable only what you need.
When to use it
Reach for EmberBurn when you need industrial data that behaves like the real thing without touching production. It gives OPC UA clients, HMIs, and historians something to develop and test against, and it bridges one protocol onto another when two systems that need to talk were never designed to.
It is equally useful as a demo rig, since the data is generated and cannot go down mid-presentation, and as a training environment for teams learning OPC UA without a PLC on the bench.
Running on EmberNet
EmberBurn runs as a single instance per node. Its web dashboard opens directly in the EmberNet dashboard, where you can browse live tag values, create and edit tags, watch active alarms, and enable or disable individual publishers.
Tags and publishers are configured through the chart's values, so a node's configuration is declarative and survives redeployment. The OPC UA endpoint is served on the node for local clients; the web UI, metrics, and OPC UA each get their own service.
The gateway ships closed by default: reads are open so the dashboard can display live data, while anything that changes a tag requires a token. OPC UA signing, encryption, and user authentication are available and off by default, so existing anonymous clients keep working until you choose to turn them on.
Keep the OPC UA port (4840) inside the cluster. The chart's network policy does this by default, and message reassembly is bounded so a misbehaving client loses its own channel rather than the server. OPC UA is an industrial protocol from an era that assumed the network was friendly; don't expose 4840 to an untrusted one.
Learn more
EmberBurn is developed and maintained by Fireball Industries.Related
- App Store Overview
- Ignition Edge: consumes EmberBurn's Sparkplug B feed
- Mosquitto: MQTT broker for the MQTT and Sparkplug B publishers
- InfluxDB
- Prometheus