Software Toolbox Technical Blog

A common use case that we encounter with many AVEVA™ users is the need to share data from System Platform with some other client or system (HMI, SCADA, other). It's not uncommon for a company to be acquired by another company and its assets and a non-AVEVA HMI/SCADA came as part of the assets.  Or perhaps a system is being add with limited interfaces for external connectivity.  Your options for sharing data largely depend on what software interfaces these "other systems" support.

In this blog post, I'll discuss how to share your AVEVA System Platform 2020 (or newer) data via OPC UA (without using OI Gateway) using the OPC Router for situations where you have another non-OPC UA capable client application that needs access to process data in your AVEVA system such as an ERP system, IIoT platform, web service and more.

If you’re reading this post, you’ve almost certainly at least heard of DCOM. And, possibly, you’re one of many who have struggled over the years with the trials of configuring remote OPC Classic connections between machines where DCOM inevitably increased your time and difficulty for what should be a relatively painless task.

And with the latest Microsoft hardening for DCOM authentication, configuring DCOM for the many existing OPC Classic solutions out there isn’t getting any easier. This blog post discusses alternatives to DCOM that cover a range of use cases depending on what software you already have installed and your existing system architecture.

Are you or have you ever been in a situation where you were working with both an AVEVA™ solution and some other client or system (HMI, SCADA, other) and needed to share data?  Perhaps your company acquired another company and its assets and a non-AVEVA HMI/SCADA came as part of the assets.  Or perhaps your company merged with another and now your AVEVA system is expected to integrate with other systems.  Your options for sharing data largely depend on what software interfaces these "other systems" support.

In this blog post, I'll discuss how to share your AVEVA System Platform 2020 (or newer) data via OPC UA (without using OI Gateway) using the Cogent DataHub® for situations where you have another non-OPC UA capable client application that needs access to process data in your AVEVA system.

For users that have never worked with OmniServer, it can be intimidating thinking about how to take information out of a device manual or protocol document and convert that into an OmniServer protocol for your device. OmniServer makes this significantly easier, though, than alternatives such as custom code, especially once you're familiar with how OmniServer works and how to get started.

Continuing our Tech Support Corner blog series, this blog post covers six tips I know should help any relatively new users be successful getting OmniServer connected to your non-standard devices as quickly as possible.

If you're reading this, you likely have at least one Siemens S7 PLC on your network being used in your industrial process and need to integrate data from that process. And, like many of our Siemens users, you're likely interested in accessing symbolic references (versus the traditional Siemens variable addresses) supported by newer S7 controllers.

In this video blog, I'll show you how to get started using our Siemens S7 Plus Ethernet driver (part of the Siemens S7 Plus Suite) to connect and gather real-time process data from Siemens S7-1500 and S7-1200 PLC symbolic variables/tagnames for AVEVA Wonderware applications.

As you may be aware, Wireshark is an incredibly useful freeware tool for capturing network traffic on a computer. Our support engineers find it to be invaluable for troubleshooting Ethernet communications issues, as it provides visibility into more than just the protocol data packets, including handshaking calls and responses.

Wireshark also provides options for specifying capture filters (for defining a smaller subset of data to be captured that you're interested in) or you can capture all traffic and apply a display filter to narrow down the traffic that is visible.

Continuing our Tech Support Corner blog series, this blog post covers how to go even further using Wireshark by defining scripted custom Wireshark captures for specific use cases, which is helpful for capturing infrequent issues without wasting a lot of unnecessary hard drive space.

OPC Router already includes a wide range of features that you may already be taking advantage of. You're likely also aware that OPC Router is regularly updated to add additional useful features and tools, and to resolve any known issues, as part of its continuous improvement process.

In this post, I will cover new features and enhancements available in OPC Router V4.27 including:

• New plug-in for OPC UA Pub/Sub (Publish/Subscribe) for expanded OPC UA functionality with a new efficient method for transferring data
• Support for the  OPC UA Cloud Library providing the ability to create and use centralized specifications based on OPC UA Companion Specifications
• Easier Docker container support with an included, ready-configured Docker sample script

Do you find yourself in need of troubleshooting a TCP connection, but your IT department has everything locked down, so you're unable to install third-party Troubleshooting tools without permission? An often overlooked but effective tool for troubleshooting TCP socket connections is PowerShell.

Continuing our Tech Support Corner blog series, this blog post covers how to use PowerShell to effectively determine what issues you may be having with a problematic TCP Ethernet connection.