Your first connected equipment in Cepaos, step by step

Before you start

• Plan: IoT telemetry is included from the Domaine plan upwards (and in every higher plan). If your plan does not include it, Cepaos shows you which plan does, with its price in your market, when you open IoT & Automation.
• Permissions: connecting equipment and gateways requires the Owner or Admin role.
• What you are connecting: if your equipment (or its manufacturer's cloud) can send data over the internet on its own, follow path A. If it is a PLC or industrial machine without its own connection, follow path B. Not sure whether it is equipment or a sensor? Read the "Equipment or sensor?" article in this help center.

Path A — the equipment already sends data over the internet

1. Go to IoT & Automation → Equipment → Connected equipment and click + Connect equipment.
2. Choose the equipment type (press, pump, bottling line, weather station…) and, if offered, the profile for your model.
3. Enter a name your team will recognise. Manufacturer, location and machine ID are optional; with the manufacturer, Cepaos suggests installation steps.
4. When the equipment is created, Cepaos shows the API key only once. Under "For your technician" you get the address the equipment must send data to, a sample message for that equipment type, a quick curl test, a downloadable configuration file and a QR code. Store the key somewhere safe: if you lose it, it cannot be shown again; you can only rotate it (a new key is generated and the old one stops working).
5. Your technician configures the equipment to send each reading as a POST to that address, with the Authorization: Bearer header followed by the key, and a JSON body with at least eventType (plus value and unit when relevant).
6. Open the equipment page. Until something arrives you will see a waiting room that refreshes every 10 seconds; when the first reading comes in, it is shown with its time and content so you can confirm the format is right.

Path B — equipment without its own connection: Cepaos Gateway

The gateway is a Raspberry Pi or mini-PC that lives in the winery and translates industrial protocols into data Cepaos understands.

1. Prepare the device: Raspberry Pi 3 or newer (Pi 4 with 2 GB or more recommended) or a mini-PC, running Raspberry Pi OS Lite 64-bit or Ubuntu Server 22.04 or later, wired to the winery network and with internet access.
2. Go to IoT & Automation → Equipment → Gateway and click Connect gateway. Enter a name and, optionally, a location.
3. Cepaos generates an install command with a token that is shown only once, is valid for 24 hours and is consumed on the first connection. Paste it into the Pi's terminal (over SSH or with keyboard and screen). The script installs the agent as a service and starts it; it takes about 2 minutes.
4. On the gateway page the status turns "Online" when the agent connects. If nothing shows up after 5 minutes, check the logs on the Pi with journalctl -u cepaos-gateway -f.
5. The gateway scans the network and lists what it finds under "Discovered devices" (it scans again every 5 minutes). Click Adopt, give it a name and it becomes a connected piece of equipment.

Protocols: Modbus TCP and MQTT have been validated with real hardware. Modbus RTU, OPC-UA and Siemens S7 are implemented but not yet validated with real hardware: contact us before relying on them in production.

Once data is flowing

• Overview (IoT & Automation → Equipment → Overview): the status of all your equipment at a glance.
• Equipment page: readings, history and live view.
• Alerts: the bell at the top right of the IoT pages opens the alert center (failed commands, errors reported by the equipment, lab analyses out of range, unreconciled bottling runs). You can mark them as read or resolve them.
• Email: turn on "Critical IoT alerts by email" in your notification preferences (Settings). Emails are only sent for new critical alerts; repeated ones are grouped so your inbox does not fill up.

Optional: remote control (Connected Winery)

Receiving data needs nothing else. Sending commands to a machine (pause, resume, start a cycle, depending on what it supports) does: it requires the Connected Winery add-on, which you will find in Settings → Modules with its price and a button to subscribe (some plans include it through a contract with our sales team).

• The first time you send a medium- or high-risk command to a machine, Cepaos asks you to accept the usage agreement for that machine.
• High-risk commands do not run until a second administrator approves them (or, if the machine has its QR equipment card, until physical presence is confirmed by scanning it). Pending ones are under IoT & Automation → Equipment → Remote control.

Troubleshooting

• The equipment shows no signal: check power and network. If it sits behind a gateway, check the gateway first.
• The equipment gets a 401 error: the key is wrong, was rotated, or the equipment was archived.
• 422 or 400 error: the JSON is not in the expected format (missing eventType or invalid JSON). Compare it with the sample message under "For your technician".
• 413 error: the message is larger than 8 KB; send smaller readings.