Industrial IoT gateway: connecting machines and plants to the cloud
An industrial IoT gateway is the bridge between the shop floor and your software. It pulls data from PLCs and from the sensors fitted to your machines, normalises it, and forwards it to the cloud or on-premise platform that powers your dashboards, alerts and predictive maintenance models. Without that connectivity layer, production data stays locked inside individual machines and never turns into decisions.
Codebaker designs and builds custom gateways and industrial edge computing for small and mid-sized manufacturers, logistics operators and food & beverage companies. We have worked from Bologna since 2019 with an in-house end-to-end team, from data acquisition to the dashboard, and the source code stays with the customer: no vendor lock-in.
What an IoT gateway actually does on the shop floor
An industrial gateway is more than a router. It speaks the language of your machines, aggregates data streams from different vendors, and makes sure nothing is lost when the network drops. It is the component that turns plant telemetry into something reliable and repeatable.
- Data acquisition from PLCs and industrial sensors over OPC-UA, Modbus and Profinet.
- Normalisation of readings from machines and vendors that speak different formats.
- Offline buffering: data is stored locally and synchronised once connectivity returns.
- Secure delivery to cloud platforms, real-time dashboards and the business systems already in place.
Connecting legacy machines without replacing the plant
Most production lines run several generations of equipment side by side: some machines expose a modern PLC, others have no digital interface at all. A gateway lets you connect legacy machinery through a retrofit, with no production stoppage and no need to scrap assets that still work perfectly well.
- Retrofit with IP65 industrial sensors for temperature, humidity and shock on machines with no data interface.
- Reading existing PLCs through the industrial protocols already running in the plant.
- End-to-end traceability and cold chain monitoring for logistics and food & beverage.
- Machine data fed into the systems you already use, with no infrastructure rebuild.
Industrial edge computing and predictive maintenance
Processing data close to the machine cuts latency and the volume of traffic sent upstream: the gateway filters, aggregates and evaluates thresholds locally, and pushes to the cloud only what is genuinely useful. On the same data we build predictive maintenance models with AI and machine learning that flag anomalies before a breakdown. Across the IoT projects we run, unplanned machine downtime drops by up to 40% and production scrap falls by 20%.
- Local processing and alarm rules at the line, with immediate notifications.
- AI predictive maintenance models fed by the telemetry the gateway collects.
- Custom dashboards and production KPIs updated in real time.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between an industrial IoT gateway and a PLC?
The PLC controls the machine and runs the automation logic; the IoT gateway does not drive the process. It reads data from the PLC and the sensors, normalises it, and makes it available to dashboards, cloud platforms and business systems. The two work side by side: the gateway sits alongside your existing PLC without changing how it operates.
Can I connect old machines that have no data interface?
Yes. When a machine exposes nothing, we retrofit it: IP65 industrial sensors for temperature, humidity or shock are fitted to the asset and wired to the edge gateway. That brings even ageing equipment into the monitoring scope without replacing it.
What happens to the data if the network connection drops?
Our industrial gateways use offline buffering: they keep collecting and processing telemetry locally and synchronise with the cloud as soon as connectivity is restored. No production data is lost during the outage.
This page is part of our IoT solutions for business hub. Tell us about your plant and we will look at it together.
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