Software Toolbox Technical Blog

By now, you’ve probably heard that TOP Server V7 has officially landed. Maybe you’ve seen the announcements or caught a quick overview along the way. But if you find yourself wondering, “Okay, but what does this release actually change for me?” you’re in the right place.

While V7 continues to reinforce the stability and reliability TOP Server is known for, this release also introduces several important enhancements aimed at strengthening enterprise deployments, simplifying user management, and modernizing system compatibility. Whether you’re operating on the latest infrastructure or maintaining long-standing environments, V7 delivers meaningful improvements that make deployment more flexible, secure, and future-ready.

Let’s take a closer look at what’s new.

In the ever-growing digital landscape of manufacturing operations, single use solutions & applications may solve issues, but also create their own data silos. These silos present multiple challenges (limited visibility, slower decision-making, security blind spots) and lead to missed opportunities due to the complex management of varying solutions. For example, OPC HDA is a standard utilized for collecting and sharing historical data across industrial automation technology solutions. Based on the standards of OPC DA, integration challenges arise due to the dependency of COM and remote DCOM connections, creating incompatibility with newer solutions and technologies.

Today we'll explore how Cogent DataHub was used to solve many of these integration headaches and silos by providing a middleware platform for connectivity between a variety of protocols and technologies. With the latest major revision of Cogent DataHub V11, the ability to collect historical OPC HDA data is now possible with the addition of the OPC HDA Client capability.

When it comes to modern data workflows, REST APIs are one of the most flexible and widely adopted methods of integrating different systems. Whether you’re working with enterprise software, cloud services, or custom applications, REST provides a lightweight way to exchange data.

In this post, we’ll explore how OPC Router’s REST Client plug-in simplifies connection to RESTful endpoints. We’ll then walk through a practical demonstration using Software Toolbox’s Data Caster product, covering: A step-by-step demo of configuring the REST Client in OPC Router to collect data from an API and display that data with Data Caster.

By the end, you’ll see how REST fits neatly into your industrial data architecture, giving you a flexible bridge between OT and IT systems.

Your organization has a custom developed application that performs important tasks, and you need to provide access to that software from an HMI, SCADA, Historian, MES, or other system acting as an OPC UA Client. Adding an OPC UA server interface to a custom application that either you've developed or that you've taken over from someone else can be a daunting task. This is especially true if you're unfamiliar with the low-level details of the OPC UA specification.

Accelerate OPC UA Server Development with the OPC Wizard Toolkit

The OPC Wizard UA Server Development Toolkit addresses this reality head-on by providing a rapid development framework that handles the underlying OPC UA nuts and bolts for you. In a recent webinar we covered how to add an OPC UA Server interface to a custom .NET software application using OPC Wizard, without having to become an “OPC wizard” yourself.

Rather than spending hours on end diving into the specifications and debugging protocol details, you can utilize simple read, write, and subscribe methods, resulting in less engineering time and faster ROI.

While Halloween and this time of year offers a few good scares, our customers in manufacturing face year-round nightmares that are far less fun: connectivity issues that stop production and unreliable data collection that restricts their ability to make informed decisions.

When your SCADA system can't communicate with your PLCs, your MES is missing critical data, and your operators are working without visibility into what's actually happening on the production floor, you're dealing with the kind of problems that lead to unplanned downtime, missed targets, and lost productivity.

In this post, we'll run through how our TOP Server handles common connectivity challenges, cover some practical tips for getting the most out of your setup, and show you how using remote configuration tools can simplify management across multiple servers, which all enable you to focus on production instead of troubleshooting communication nightmares.

Industrial data is most valuable when it can be seen, understood, and acted upon. OPC UA has long been a widely adopted standard for securely exchanging data in industrial automation, but many users still face challenges: quickly visualizing live values without heavy software, sharing those values with non-technical stakeholders, and reducing setup complexity. 

That’s why we’re excited to announce a new feature in DataCaster: direct OPC UA connectivity. So excited that we made a video about it that you can watch further down this blog in which I will show you how easy this new feature is to implement.With this enhancement, DataCaster can now connect to your OPC UA servers, browse and select tags, and stream live data values into simple displays where they matter most: bridging the gap between raw data and real-time decision-making with just a few clicks.

OmniServer is a universal data acquisition application designed to bi-directionally exchange data with a wide range of Ethernet, serial, or USB devices that use “non-standard protocols” such as weigh scales, barcode readers, lab instruments, inspection machines, printers, and more.

The wide range of connectivity options enable OmniServer to send that data to HMI, SCADA, MES, or Historian systems using standard interfaces like OPC DA, OPC UA, and AVEVA SuiteLink. It also has an optional MQTT Client Plug-In that allows users to publish data to MQTT Brokers.

Since 2016, LGH File Inspector has been the trusted tool for AVEVA™ InTouch HMI users who need quick, reliable access to their historical data. Whether it’s pulling files from network drives, automating queries with batch files, or setting up scheduled reports, the Software Toolbox team has helped users integrate LGH File Inspector into a wide range of solutions.

In this post, I have collected and summarized tools and learning material to ease your experience in applying LGH File Inspector and help you get started quickly. Towards the end you will find the highlights of the webinar I hosted covering the new features of LGH File Inspector Version 4, that addressed several issues users previously faced.