If you are working with a Digital Twin, what devices are you having trouble connecting to your platform?
It’s Make Anything Thursday, and I’ve been stewing on this question. I would love your take, if you work in digital manufacturing or infrastructure.
A Digital Twin promises to inform better decisions, reduce waste, and accelerate progress toward net zero. To get there, we can’t ignore the cracks at the edges. We need to make the invisible visible.
I recently started a five-part series, ‘Dear Harvey: Staying in the Game (Fractals)’. Fractals are fascinating to me.
In the introduction, linked above, I wrote about Paul Graham’s idea that knowledge grows fractally—smooth at a distance, but full of cracks and hidden edges when you look closer. The deeper you zoom, the more detail—and the more challenge—you discover.
The same is true for Digital Twin technology in manufacturing and infrastructure. If you buy into the marketing hype, it appears that everything is interconnected: sensors, meters, machines, and dashboards. But zoom in and the cracks appear.
Hidden Devices
Billions of devices worldwide—meters, HVAC systems, factory controllers—remain invisible to digital systems. They speak old “languages” like Modbus, BACnet MSTP, or M-Bus, or they send messy, incomplete data.
This is why many Digital Twins stall at the early maturity stages. Autodesk’s Tandem vision outlines a clear path—from descriptive models to connected, to predictive, to prescriptive. But hidden devices keep organisations stuck between stages one and two.
There are some great ‘case studies’ out there that might lead you to think otherwise, but it is not uncommon for me to hear digital manufacturing executives say,
“We still operate in the dark.”
That darkness is the edge of the fractal. And to move past it, we need a way to bring the invisible into view.
When that happens, the maturity curve shifts. The twin moves beyond static models and partial feeds into a living, operational platform—one that supports predictive maintenance, sustainability insights, and portfolio-wide decision-making.
Call to action
That brings me back to the million dollar question. How do you connect these hidden devices and what is the cost?
