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HotLoop Gateway

HotLoop logo

An industrial automation gateway in one static Go binary.

Category: HotLoop

HotLoop Gateway polls PLCs and servers in their own protocols, keeps every reading and its quality in a historian, raises alarms, runs automations against all of it, and hands the plant to agents over the Model Context Protocol. A site runs one chart, the Gateway and its database, instead of a historian, an alarm server and a rules engine glued together.

What it does​

  • Speaks OPC UA (subscriptions, not polling), Modbus TCP and RTU, MQTT with Sparkplug B as a full primary host application, EtherNet/IP, S7comm, MTConnect and HTTP/REST.
  • Historises to TimescaleDB, with a deadband per tag, and every reading carries good, uncertain or bad quality. A bad reading is unknown, never zero.
  • Evaluates ISA-18.2 alarms and pages them out to ntfy, Gotify, Discord, a webhook or email.
  • Runs automations, scripts, recipes and blueprints, and keeps a logbook of every state change, write, alarm and config change on one timeline.
  • Exposes the plant over MCP so agents can read it, and drive it where you allow.

Writing to equipment is the part to take seriously, and HotLoop is built that way. Writes ship switched off, every tag is read-only until somebody arms it, a value outside its range is refused instead of clamped, and every attempt is audited before it touches the wire.

When to use it​

Use HotLoop Gateway when a site needs to read its equipment, keep history, alarm on it and act on it, and you'd rather run one thing than four. It's the top of the HotLoop lineup, with fleet management, multi-site roll-ups and scheduled reports. For a small box at the edge that only needs to read and forward, use the HotLoop Edge Relay, which feeds a Gateway over Sparkplug B.

Running on EmberNet​

  • The Gateway deploys as a single instance per node, with its database alongside it in the same release.
  • The chart requests 350m of CPU and 640Mi of memory, with limits of 3 CPU and 2560Mi. Size the node for the historian you plan to keep.
  • Since 4.17.0, device passwords are encrypted at rest with a key the chart generates into a Secret named <release>-secret-key and keeps across upgrades. That Secret is part of your data: back it up somewhere other than next to your backups, because restoring credentials needs it.
  • Coming from 4.16.0 or 4.3.1, read HotLoop's upgrade guide before you upgrade. A plain upgrade from 4.3.1 fails outright.

Licensing​

HotLoop Gateway is source-available under the HotLoop Community License. Any business use goes through EmberNet, where signing up is free and running HotLoop is free. There's no license key, because which product you run is just which image you pulled. Support, SLAs and rollouts come from Fireball Industries, HotLoop's Official Systems Integrators. See Using HotLoop in a business.

Learn more​

EmberNet packages and deploys this application; HotLoop is developed by HotLoop. Product names and logos are trademarks of their respective owners.