Software Toolbox Technical Blog

As technical consultants at Software Toolbox, we are often approached by users who need to expose data from a software application they have written, or are writing, to communicate from systems they own to a client, HMI/SCADA, or historian. And, in many cases, there are dozens of applications at different sites that the data needs to reach. The question we are then presented with is, “how can I accomplish this quickly and efficiently while staying within budget?” 

Our hope is to answer this question and share from our experience with OPC since 1996, what our users have told us are the common reasons why they chose to use a commercial OPC server toolkit, and to help readers determine what factors to consider for their specific situation and circumstances.

In a previous blog post, we covered the basics of commercial OPC client development toolkits, with a dive into the benefits of using one, while here in part 2, our focus is on OPC server development toolkits. If you read our blog on OPC client toolkits, you will likely notice a clear overlap in the benefits you gain from using both types of commercial OPC toolkits.

If you're a SLIK-DA/UA OPC Server development toolkit user with your own custom OPC UA Server applications or have worked with any of our other OPC UA enabled solutions, you may have noticed properties or configuration options in your software by the name of Local Discovery, Discovery URL, Discovery Servers, or Discovery Domain. Clearly, there is a recurring theme here of “Discovery”. Taking this even further, you may also have a Windows Service running on your PC called “OPC UA Local Discovery Server” (LDS), but we often encounter users who don’t know what a UA Discovery Server is, how to leverage it with their custom SLIK-DA OPC UA Servers, or why they should even consider it. Proper usage and implementation of an OPC UA Discovery Server will make it easy to find and connect to your UA Servers from your UA Client software applications such as HMI, SCADA, MES, & Historians if they also support OPC UA Discovery.

With the release of the OPC Data Client 2023.1 toolkit, custom OPC client developers will benefit from improvements targeted at platform support, developer productivity, and custom application end user productivity.  If you missed the OPC Data Client 2022 releases, be sure and read what we added to OPC Data Client in 2022. As always, OPC Data Client license holders on an active support and maintenance agreement are entitled to free upgrades.

It's common for members of the Software Toolbox Technical Team to encounter instances where users need to configure thousands of static tags for the devices in their TOP Server projects. We have even supported implementations with over a million tags.

In such situations, it would be inefficient to manually add each individual tag to TOP Server. There are several better alternatives for adding large quantities of static tags to a TOP Server project: Automation Tag Generation (ATG), Bulk Tag Creation, and/or CSV Import/Export.

Continuing our Tech Support Corner blog series, this post covers what methods you have available to mass create large quantities of static TOP Server tags and how to use them for greater efficiency.

With Modbus having been around since 1979, I’m sure you have had some interaction with it or at least awareness of it if you work in the automation industry. Our TOP Server is very widely used for its Modbus TCP/IP Ethernet Driver and variety of Modbus serial drivers to enable users to connect to any Modbus devices that they have in the field. For that common use case, the device is the Modbus Server, and the TOP Server is the Modbus Client.

But what if you needed to configure TOP Server to be the Modbus TCP/IP Server (i.e. the “device”)? That is the purpose of this next post in our continuing Tech Support Corner blog series – to discuss and tell you how you can configure TOP Server to act as a Modbus server device, which is a common need for systems where either a device or other software application can only act as a Modbus Client and you have other systems that need connectivity to that Modbus client.

Following on the recent OPC Data Client 2021.3 release a few months ago, the OPC Data Client toolkit has been updated again to give developers more options, help them deal with Microsoft technology changes, and add new functionality to their applications. We will cover the highlights here in this technically deep blog post.

Be sure to read about the DCOM hardening that Microsoft is performing and options to be ready, to get ahead of potential support calls from your users.

Following on the recent OPC Data Client 2021.2 release a few months ago, the OPC Data Client toolkit has been updated again to further extend it's OPC UA client functionality. 

The new updates provide developers of custom OPC client applications with new operating system support, even more examples including Powershell examples, and a large number of improvements to all the supported OPC interfaces to increase flexibility, troubleshooting, and user experience, while further decreasing development time. 

Following on the recent OPC Data Client 2021.1 release a few months ago, the OPC Data Client toolkit has been updated again to further extend it's OPC UA client functionality. 

The new updates provide developers of custom OPC client applications new options to interact with even more OPC UA servers or more richly with existing OPC UA servers. This blog post teaches you how OPC UA PubSub security is different from regular OPC UA security, how to improve JSON/OPC UA PubSub interoperability with a new utility, and why you might care about OPC UA File Transfer.