Software Toolbox Technical Blog

Now that we’ve proved it at the recent ProveIt! 2025 Conference, I want to give our technical teams a break from providing our usual deep technical content. They will be back next week for sure, but this week, I want to share what we are planning as 2025 moves forward in solutions, blog, services, events, and an important tech tip to wrap things up. 

First, don’t forget the valuable resources in one of the first blogs of this year “2025 Automation & Control Software Learning Resources” that delivered a summary of learning resources, recent product releases, and more.

Because we strive to keep this blog technical, we suggest you subscribe to blog notifications using the form at the right and follow us on LinkedIn to keep up to date with news around Software Toolbox all year round.

Welcome to our most popular blog post of the year! Each year we publish this blog post to help you learn, grow, and support empowering you to improve your business.

This post is our 7th annual sharing of references to learning resources including our ever hot Tech Support Corner, popular technical blog posts, and product capabilities that users have told us were the most helpful to them over the course of the last year.

2023 continued the challenges in supply chain, inflation, labor shortages, and exploding customer demand and in many cases technology continues to be a key part of dealing with the challenges.

In today's blog post, I reach out to you in tribute to Kevin M. Rutherford, our dear friend and colleague. 

It is with an exceptionally heavy heart that I am writing to share that Kevin passed away suddenly and unexpectedly on May 14, 2023. Our compassion, love and support go out to his wife Jennifer, Kevin's family, their friends and extended family at this time of loss. Last week, we held a week of silence on this blog in honor of Kevin. This week we felt moved to honor Kevin here, the place many of you heard from him regularly and share what he meant to us, partners, & clients around the world. Bear with us, as we have a lot to say, but we loved Kevin and he will be missed forever. 

This week's post is a technical update to share news about updates released for DataHub and OPC Data Logger, reminders about the value of the Tech Support corner, and your last warning about DCOM Hardening before the Windows update next week!

The team is working on some more tech tips and video tutorials that you'll start seeing later this month. Meanwhile, here's this week's update.

Ongoing digital transformation and operational visibility initiatives continue to demand the integration of different systems using different technologies. With increased adoption of secure OPC UA and MQTT Sparkplug B, it’s only to be expected that users will have systems that support one or the other technology but need to communicate with each other.

Although OPC UA supports a publish-subscribe mechanism with OPC UA PubSub, and adoption of OPC UA is strong and growing, the reality is there will be situations where the user is already using MQTT Sparkplug B and needs to integrate it with OPC UA or vice-versa, without writing custom code or going through complex configuration.

Software Toolbox was founded in 1996 on the principal of making data and device integration easy by using configurable off-the-shelf software to avoiding writing custom solutions and knowing the pros and cons of and ins and outs of many technologies. That mission remains strong, as you’ll see, as we discuss interoperating between OPC UA and MQTT in this blog post.

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.

As you are probably aware, the Ping command is one of the most widely used diagnostics tool when troubleshooting communication issues on Ethernet networks. I would accredit this popularity to the fact that everyone knows how to use the command, it's extremely simple to execute, and the results are not really open to interpretation (i.e. it either works or it doesn’t); or are they?

When troubleshooting communication issues, the most common line we hear when something isn’t working is “but I can ping it” as if this alone should serve as definitive proof that everything is working as expected and the communications server is choosing to not communicate.

Continuing our Tech Support Corner blog series, this blog post covers some common misconceptions about the Ping command, particularly how it can be used efficiently, and when it may not be the best tool for the task, as well as, better alternatives to Ping that actually provide actionable data.

In recent years, many of our users have let us know they are adopting the latest Siemens technology, particularly S7-1500 controllers.  And, with that adoption of those controllers, users have been asking for connectivity via the symbolic optimized block addressing.  So we added a Siemens Plus Suite to enable connectivity to new and legacy Siemens devices.

This post focuses specifically on the general steps required to integrate S7-1500 controllers by connecting to their embedded OPC UA server using TOP Server for AVEVA.