Software Toolbox Technical Blog

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.

Risk is often defined as the likelihood that something will occur multiplied by the impact it would have. In the world of automation, some of those possible impacts are unexpected downtime, loss of data, theft of information, damage to people and products, and inaccurate data – not to mention the fines and penalties when government regulations are not met.

At Software Toolbox, we understand that data availability, integrity, and confidentiality are of the utmost importance. As the adoption of IIoT grows, so does network exposure, increasing the likelihood of potential security issues. Implementing safe protocols and practices are essential to mitigating these risks.

Though you may have never needed to contact Software Toolbox for support, it’s always smart to be ready for any challenges that might arise. That’s why it’s helpful to know the resources you have at your disposal, should you ever need to connect with our experienced support team to overcome any challenges when using our solutions.

At Software Toolbox, we are committed to providing our users with timely and high-quality responses to their support incidents. While your question or issue might not always be completely resolved after the first response, you can expect to receive our initial response within 2 regular business hours after submitting a question, although it often happens much sooner! We even have some tools that can help speed up this process.

As a part of our Tech Support Corner blog post series, this blog post covers how the OPC Router’s Application Report helps us help you by allowing you to provide much of the information that we need to troubleshoot issues when you initially contact us.

Welcome back to our Summer of IoT blog series! We hope that last week’s introduction to the series created excitement as we continue to explore how our IoT solutions can help you achieve even greater success with your Industry 4.0 and Digital Transformation initiatives.

In today's video blog, we will be integrating REST with MQTT by using OPC Router to connect to a RESTful API service and publish data to HiveMQ's MQTT Broker. Although we will use a public webservice to illustrate the concept, the steps we take would be the same for any OT or IT data source that can serve data via a RESTful web service/API.

Software Toolbox’s solutions play a pivotal role throughout multiple renewable energy sectors. However, our solutions don't only help with the day-to-day creation of renewable energy but also the supply chains that enable the creation of these energy sources, reducing cost and increasing efficiency across all levels of your business via automation.

Last week, we shared a specific use case of how our software is being used to help reduce waste and energy usage. In this final post of our Environmental Sustainability series, we will explore additional ways our software can be, and has been, used across the entire automation pyramid to reduce waste and increase efficiency. Chances are, this is something you are already very familiar with. But for those of you who are not, the automation pyramid functions as a conceptual blueprint utilized in industrial automation representing the different levels of data transfer necessary for automation. This pyramid likely aligns with the different areas within your business.

There is significant growth in companies offloading their applications, data management, files, and content to cloud hosted systems. While this is great for a multitude of reasons, have you wondered what impact that might have on your business reaching its sustainability goals? That's where we have some good news – the cloud can be, and typically is, green, because of the economies of scale that large data centers provide. In this second post of our Environmental Sustainability blog series, we'll look at what cloud providers and data centers are doing, how using cloud computing can help reduce your company's energy usage and carbon footprint, and how Software Toolbox's solutions empower them all.

Software Toolbox has been a fixture in the automation industry since 1996, offering software tools and components from project conception to completion. Our expert staff is committed to helping customers leverage current technologies while offering ways to enhance or expand systems and approaches to achieve even greater returns. When it comes to our OPC Data Client Development Toolkit, that promise remains the same, and we want to help you make the best decisions for your development workflow.

The OPC Data Client has offered the usage of NuGet packages since 2016 as an alternative to adding assembly references via the components when writing custom OPC client applications. As our users have moved towards the use of NuGet, we made this a requirement for .NET Framework beginning with our V2022.2 release. In this blog post and accompanying video, we will cover what NuGet is, when to use it, and how to use it if it makes sense for your requirements.

Applications tend to have a lot of moving parts. Here at Software Toolbox, we know that understanding these parts is important whether you are new to an application or a seasoned veteran who wants a more robust understanding for the sake of troubleshooting and optimization. Because of this, part of our job is to help you recognize and understand the components of our products to maximize your ROI when using our solutions.

In this blog post, we'll provide an overview of the different components of OPC Data Logger, an effective solution for reliable, event-driven logging of data from OPC server data sources (both OPC UA and OPC DA) to SQL and ODBC databases (including Microsoft Azure SQL) or text and CSV files. We'll cover the wizard-based interface used for Configuration, the difference between the Service and Runtime, and the Notification functionality so you can understand the purpose of each component and how to configure them to meet your logging needs.