Software Toolbox Technical Blog

Over the last several years, it has become a beloved tradition to start the new blog year with a review of the most popular content the team at Software Toolbox put together to build your automation software skills and empower your success. This is the 8th installment of this blog summary covering a wide variety of topics. But first things first: make sure you are subscribed to our blog. We publish new content at least once a week, and you have full control over the frequency of when you are notified.

When working with Modbus communication, understanding the key concept of function codes is essential for ensuring efficient and accurate data exchange. Sometimes a device manual might only refer to the supported Modbus function codes and the range of offsets available for those function codes. A solid understanding of function codes is critical in achieving optimized performance and resolving potential communication issues.

After reading this blog, you'll know how you can leverage TOP Server’s Modbus driver to automatically handle the appropriate function codes for your application – while also taking advantage of its flexibility and other advanced features – to enhance performance, ensure compatibility with your devices, and reduce troubleshooting time.

IoT, IIoT, MQTT, Big Data, and The Cloud—these tools and technologies are shaping the future of various industries. But how do you actually bring your critical process or control data into the cloud for real-time analytics, predictive maintenance, or smart manufacturing? That’s the most critical part, because in today’s connected world, data is power. Organizations are leveraging IoT and IIoT to optimize operations, predict maintenance issues before they happen, and unlock insights through advanced analytics in the cloud. That’s where Amazon AWS IoT Core and Cogent DataHub IoT Gateway come in.

When you hear "EFM data", you probably think of well-known Oil & Gas devices like ABB TotalFlow, Fisher ROC, or OMNI Flow and their native protocols, or perhaps Enron Modbus. However, the Oil & Gas industry is quickly embracing the DNP3 protocol for its speed and security in pipeline monitoring.

Current generation Emerson devices, like the FB1000 and FB2000 Series Flow Computers or FB3000 RTUs, support secure DNP3, which is the recommended protocol by Emerson. But how can you extract both real-time data as well as EFM alarm, event and flow history data from them? Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered! 

In this blog, you’ll learn about the powerful capabilities of the DNP3 protocol and how you can use the TOP Server DNP3 Driver and Software Toolbox EFM Exporter for Emerson FB Automation Platform together to efficiently and accurately provide automated, scheduled liquid and gas real-time and accounting data retrieval from your Emerson Devices and export that EFM data to the FLOWCAL CFX format.

Redundancy is a broad concept, as explored in our Demystifying Redundancy Blog. In this post, we narrow the focus on how to manage redundant OPC servers—a critical topic for ensuring reliable process communications to your HMI, SCADA, MES, Historian, etc. Redundancy is crucial because it ensures continuous operation and data integrity in the event of system failures, minimizing downtime and potential losses.

Simply deploying two OPC servers connected to your PLCs doesn’t make them redundant. We're sometimes asked about having the two OPC servers communicate and decide when to failover. That sounds good but has a flaw. If the client loses network connection to one OPC server but the two OPC servers are still communicating, and the HMI/SCADA doesn’t have any internal failover mechanism, then no failover will occur.

Welcome back to our Data Storage Deep Dive series! In our previous post, we demonstrated how Cogent DataHub can integrate with AVEVA PI System to push data to CONNECT Data Services. However, with CONNECT, getting data in seems to be the easy part. What if you need to get data out and are unsure of what options are available?

With support for RESTful connections, OPC Router is capable of interpreting OMF from CONNECT and can seamlessly integrate that data with OPC UA, SAP, SQL, MQTT, REST, InfluxDB, and more, enabling users to have a successful Industry 4.0 implementation.

Secure data transmission between the Operational Technology (OT) and Information Technology (IT) layers is a critical concern in industrial automation. Traditional methods often expose critical systems to vulnerabilities by opening ports on the OT level when leveraging standard OPC deployments. While OPC UA has streamlined industrial communications by eliminating the complexities of DCOM configuration and its associated security risks, the continued use of open ports still leaves potential vulnerabilities for attackers to exploit.

DataHub Tunneling has often been viewed as just another way to bypass DCOM or an alternative to OPC UA, but it is much more than that. In this blog post we’ll explore four ways Cogent DataHub, a versatile middleware software solution, can address these security challenges by leveraging its advanced tunneling capabilities and more.

When working with Modbus devices and TOP Server, one critical factor that can significantly influence communication efficiency is the concept of block sizes. Optimizing block sizes for your application ensures smooth data transfer between your Modbus device and TOP Server, improving overall system performance.

In this blog, we’ll talk about what Modbus block sizes are, why they matter, and how to configure them effectively in TOP Server for the best results. We’ll also cover what happens when a block request includes non-contiguous addresses or undefined memory, causing potential issues with valid data. Additionally, it is important to note that other drivers/protocols may utilize block sizes as well, so these concepts could apply to other protocols beyond just Modbus.