R&D Denmark is an engineering company that supplies knowledge and turnkey deliveries to customers within a wide range of aerospace and wind energy production industries. They have broad industry knowledge and highly specialized engineers which helps them provide their customers with the right expertise to execute their projects — from heavy-duty test systems and lifting solutions for the wind industry to product development and automation.

R&D Denmark chose InfluxDB for its easy, fast and flexible data collection/storage, something very important when developing some of the world’s biggest industrial test benches. Using InfluxDB has helped the company develop, test, and commission its industrial solutions quickly and with a high degree of certainty. The ability to easily store and visualize historic data has been invaluable.

All industrial PLCs that are used in R&D Denmark’s systems send data to a single InfluxDB instance via simple TCP/IP connections. Grafana is then used to query InfluxDB for data visualization for both developers during system commissioning and customers when the system has been handed over. This is a part of what makes the company world-leading in turnkey test bench deliveries. InfluxDB has been a game changer for building this industrial application for R&D Engineering and has even led to their customers switching to use InfluxDB (DAQ) even though they have other, more expensive solutions already in place.

The team at R&D Engineering likes that InfluxDB integrates well with other tools, is open source, is scalable and performant, and has an easy-to-use query language. It is imperative that the storage system integrates well with other tools, since R&D Denmark’s use cases vary during their customer’s system lifetime. During the development phase, data collected in InfluxDB is used to calibrate and tune system performance. During commissioning phase, the data is used for documenting performance, and after handover, the data is used by customers for maintenance evaluations.

Software Team Manager Jorgen Houmoller recommends InfluxDB because it is easy to install on many operating systems, and with the good documentation available, it is up and running in no time. You don’t need an old-fashioned user manual like other applications, and if you need help, there are many tips and solutions available on the internet. Numerous programs, tools and plugins are available to work with InfluxDB. The simple HTTP line protocol makes InfluxDB communication easy for almost all programming languages and systems.