Micro-PLC connects to IP and MQTT ‘solving an automation pain point’
5 June 2026 
The Greek IoT controller specialist Erqos has launched a CE-certified MicroPLC designed to solve an automation pain point – connecting machine-level control and industrial I/O directly to modern IP and MQTT-based systems. It says that conventional micro-PLCs were created for an era when control systems lived entirely inside a panel and typically require gateways, protocol converters, or polling servers to participate in connected architectures. The EQSP32CE controller brings Internet‑era communications into the controller, eliminating much of this complexity.
The DIN-rail controller’s native wired Ethernet and Wi‑Fi provide direct IP connections for Modbus TCP, MQTT, cloud storage, AI analytics, remote diagnostics, OTA firmware updates, and supervisory integration. It includes protected RS-485, RS-232, and CANbus interfaces, supporting Modbus RTU, DMX512, custom serial protocols, and CAN‑based machine communications.
Each of the controller’s 16 I/O terminals can be assigned by software, rather than being fixed at the factory as an input or output. All terminals can operate as digital inputs or solid-state outputs, while the first eight also support analogue modes, including 0–10V, 4–20mA, relative analogue inputs, and thermistor temperature sensing.
The I/O system also includes functions normally associated with more specialised controllers, such as debounce handling, high-speed TTL outputs up to 1MHz, hardware pulse counters, encoder interfaces, PWM generation, smart coil drives, protected solid-state outputs up to 1A, integrated flyback protection for inductive loads, and power-supply monitoring. This gives the controller one of the widest real-world I/O capabilities available for a micro-PLC, allowing it to drive and monitor relays, valves, pumps, actuators, sensors, counters, meters and other field devices, directly.
“The shift in automation has been unmistakable,” says Erqos CTO, Cosma Pabouctsidis. “Early adopters showed us that systems requiring cloud connectivity, MQTT integration, remote diagnostics, and AI-driven analytics are moving faster than traditional PLC architectures can technically and economically support. We built the EQSP32CE to deliver the rugged reliability of a micro-PLC with the native Internet-era capabilities that automation engineers and system integrators now consider essential.”
At the heart of the controller is a dual-core 240MHz system-on-chip with 8MB of Flash memory and 512KB of RAM, giving it processing power far beyond what is typically available in micro-PLCs. This allows it to handle local control, communications, data formatting, edge automation, remote services and protocol integration. Unlike closed micro-PLC platforms that restrict developers to fixed runtimes and vendor-controlled function blocks, the EQSP32CE uses an open architecture that gives engineers direct access to processing, timing, networking and communications resources.
It also taps into the world’s biggest pool of free, open-source tools, software libraries, and working examples, cutting development cycles and enabling custom protocols, advanced data formatting, local intelligence, remote services, and integrations that are difficult, costly, or impossible to implement on conventional micro-PLCs.
The EQSP32CE is supported by a growing range of expansion modules, including digital I/O, analogue inputs and outputs, thermocouples, PT100/RTD, pH, relay, and GSM/GPRS cellular modules. These modules are mounted side-by-side with the controller and connected via an expansion port. Once connected, they are enumerated automatically and made available to the application as if they were local I/O, using the same software model as the onboard terminals. Extra expansion functions are planned.
The EQSP32CE also introduces a programming environment that is said to be “revolutionary” in capability, yet familiar in use. Through EQ-AI, Erqos’s generative AI development system for connected control applications, automation engineers can describe control behaviour in the terms they already use: plain-language steps, ladder-style sequences, state machines, or simple cause-and-effect logic. EQ-AI then generates EQSP32CE code that implements both local control logic and the connectivity layer, including MQTT messaging, JSON payloads, Rest APIs, cloud interaction, remote diagnostics, and coordination across distributed subsystems. This allows engineers to keep their familiar way of thinking for automation logic, while gaining access to modern connected-system capabilities even without needing a specialised background in network programming, Web protocols, or cloud integration.
The EQSP32CE also addresses another common pain point in connected automation: field commissioning. Using the controller’s built-in Bluetooth capability, a smartphone app EQConnect establishes a direct local connection to the micro-PLC, allowing installers to provide Wi-Fi credentials, set timezones, configure MQTT broker credentials, and monitor I/O states and operating modes in real time. In many installations, these commissioning and diagnostic tasks can be performed from outside the cabinet, without having to open the panel or connect a programming cable.
The EQSP32CE is already being used in applications including smart irrigation, water treatment, HVAC, solar control, heliostat tracking, AGVs, and pool and spa automation.
The controller is available for worldwide shipping from Erqos’ online store at €155 / $185 in single-unit quantities. Volume pricing is available for OEM customers.
MQTT – the protocol behind AWS IoT, Azure IoT Hub, Node-Red, Home Assistant, and many others – is a lightweight publish/subscribe messaging protocol increasingly used as the communications backbone for automation systems. Instead of requiring each controller, dashboard, database, analytics engine, and supervisory system to communicate through direct point-to-point links, MQTT allows devices to publish structured data to a broker and allows other systems to subscribe only to the information they need.
As automation systems expand beyond electrical panels, specifiers increasingly require machines and other systems to expose live operating data to Scada systems, cloud storage, smartphone dashboards, APIs, AI analytics, and distributed supervisory layers. The controller is no longer isolated at the edge of the machine, but a connected automation node exchanging data with cloud services, Scada, APIs, AI analytics, distributed systems, and mobile dashboards.
For conventional micro-PLCs, this shift often requires gateways, protocol converters, polling PCs, middleware, and manual mapping between register-based fieldbus data and modern JSON or API-based software systems. The EQSP32CE removes much of this complexity by making MQTT, IP networking, remote diagnostics, OTA updates, and connected-system integration native to the controller.
Athens-based Erqos Technologies was set up to bridge the gap between closed legacy micro-PLCs (rugged, but limited by proprietary toolchains, fixed runtimes, vendor-controlled function blocks, and architectures that were not designed for modern connected systems) and open-source microcontrollers (powerful, flexible, and supported by huge software ecosystems, but not industrially deployable out of the box).
Erqos combines these two worlds in certified DIN-rail control hardware that gives developers the rugged I/O, field wiring, protection, and mounting expected from industrial controllers, while preserving the openness, processing power, and software freedom of modern embedded systems.
