Software Toolbox Technical Blog

Each year, National Napping Day recognizes our need for rest the day following the return of daylight saving time, when many of us shift our clocks forward one hour. If you are one of the many who "sprang forward" this past Sunday, we hope you have been able to catch up on your rest over the past several days. Today, however, we’re going to talk about a different kind of "REST" and how it can help you spring forward in your OT/IT integration goals and Industry 4.0 initiatives.

From Canary to AVEVA CONNECT, many technologies include a RESTful interface that can be leveraged when other avenues are unavailable. In this blog, you’ll learn how you can take advantage of RESTful APIs to easily integrate systems that do not have a native way to interact with each other, resulting in a standardized, scalable, and secure way to exchange data between enterprise IT systems and industrial OT environments.

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.

Welcome back to our Data Storage Deep Dive series, where we have been exploring the possibilities of integrating our variety of industrial automation software solutions with historians to allow for a deeper understanding of trends within your data. In our previous installment, Software Toolbox Helps You Fly Higher with Canary Historian, we demonstrated how TOP Server, OmniServer and DataHub can collect data from unique sources with different communication needs to Canary Data Historian for aggregation and analysis. Today, we are going to look at how OPC Router can be used to extract the historical data and expose it in an intuitive format for any OPC UA Client to consume.

As OPC UA has grown in it's adoption, more device vendors are implementing OPC UA interfaces on their PLCs and other devices to increase interoperability. OPC UA has been proven to be an adaptable specification with its ability to accommodate industry-specific nuances in data formats, leading to implementations that expose information in ways that make practical sense.

As a middleware solution, OPC Router implements a variety of OPC UA features outside of the generic Data Access profile to cast a wide net for devices it can support.

Sometimes we are approached by users and integrators with very specific business demands, and an off-the-shelf OPC client solution isn't always the answer to their problems. As they explore the fully customizable development toolkits on the market, they are often concerned that their OPC expertise is inadequate for writing their own OPC client application. How should states and client objects be handled? When would an OPC group need to be created and have items added? What about timeouts, keep-alive intervals and more? Isn't PubSub (as in OPC UA PubSub) a deli sandwich from a popular grocery store called Publix in the US region we live in? Look – we hear you – and its problems like this that Software Toolbox has been solving since 1996. Let's start by saying this up front – you do NOT need to be an OPC expert or understand the internal complexities of OPC connectivity. Our OPC client development toolkit handles all of that and so much more for you. Let's learn more. 

OPC Router is a powerful tool that can be used to easily integrate large quantities of data from a variety of sources using its modular configuration, adding value to a variety of industrial, business (ERP/SAP), and IoT data systems. It's drag and drop visual workflows result in reduced engineering time and risk in Industry 4.0, IIoT, and Digital Transformation applications. When combined with Software Toolbox's OPC server offerings and other automation software, plus decades of expertise in automation, the results are rapid time-to-value solutions.

In the following getting started video, we'll walk through a simple example to show you the fundamentals of developing a project in OPC Router. You'll learn how to comfortably navigate the configuration & runtime troubleshooting interface and how to verify that your setup is functioning properly. This process will also give insight into the building blocks that make the product so flexible and adaptable to many different use cases.

To achieve operational and business goals, many industrial automation system architectures are designed to push and pull data from a multitude of sources and destinations that come with a variety of formats. Bridging the gap between systems that use distinct standards and protocols can be challenging if the right tools aren't properly selected, and too often users resort to custom software. This is where users can leverage OPC Router’s ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) Tools—a valuable solution for seamlessly repackaging data across processes that use distinct standards or protocols.

In this article, we will briefly introduce the power of OPC Router’s ETL Tools, exploring a few use cases that highlight their role in structuring data into popular file formats. If you are not already familiar with what OPC Router is and what it can do for your particular process, you can visit the OPC Router website or the OPC Router Technical Guides with a Quick Start for New Users.

Your operations visibility relies on real-time data from machinery, systems, and field devices. When there are communications issues resulting in loss of or inaccurate data, addressing issues promptly is critical. Whether it's stale, poor quality, or missing data in your SCADA or HMI application, a well-defined troubleshooting procedure is a must. Like all our products, the TOP Server OPC Server offers an arsenal of tools to inform you about what is happening and streamline your troubleshooting process, summarized in our previous blog post, Minimize Downtime with TOP Server Troubleshooting Tools.

In this post, we'll take a deep dive into some of those tools, with an emphasis on the device connection side of TOP Server, teaching you a step-by-step process to pinpoint communication issues at their source. While this specific example uses the Modbus Ethernet Driver and an OPC DA Client connection, the same principles can be applied when troubleshooting various other scenarios.