Measuring a machine without touching the plant network

Proposing a measurement box on a production line raises two sets of questions, and rarely from the same person. The maintenance manager wants to know what the reported value is actually worth. The security officer, or the customer sending out a supplier questionnaire, wants to know what that box touches. Both answers come down to the same architectural choice.

Physical quantities, not estimates

The Sybox sits close to the machines. It records vibration (maximum, mean, variance) and the equipment's immediate surroundings: air quality, CO2eq, humidity, temperature. It is the unit that carries the LTE-M cellular link out, and the only one.

The Syway is the companion unit. It mounts near the cabinet, takes current clamps that snap onto the conductors without breaking the circuit (up to 500 amperes, one reading per second) and reports to the Sybox over Bluetooth Low Energy.

Values come back raw or processed by machine learning. You read them on a web dashboard, pull them into existing tools through an API, and set thresholds that raise an alert when a measurement leaves its expected range.

The plant network stays closed

The Sybox brings up its own cellular link. It does not attach to the site's IT network: nothing to open, no firewall rule to negotiate, no asset to register. Data capture is physically separated from the customer's information system.

That architectural detail answers three converging texts. The Cyber Resilience Act requires cybersecurity to be built into a product from the design phase rather than bolted on later. The NIS 2 directive obliges essential entities to assess the practices of their direct suppliers: a device that never enters the local infrastructure adds no vulnerability to assess. The Machinery Regulation requires control systems to withstand malicious attempts; here, no path connects the capture device to the production controllers.

Supplier questionnaires keep asking the same thing: what happens if your box is compromised? When it is connected to nothing but its cellular operator, the answer is short.

One machine first, then the next

Nothing forces you to equip a whole line. The sensor mounts on existing equipment, the clamp goes on its supply, and the next machine can wait a month if the budget says so. Older assets take it as well as recent ones: the machine is not modified, it is observed.

Being independent from site IT removes the part of the project that stalls most often, the network access request and the time it takes to be reviewed. It puts condition monitoring within reach of a small manufacturer and a mid-sized group alike, with the same hardware.