Software Toolbox Technical Blog

Unlock Oil & Gas Operational Excellence - Software Toolbox Solutions

6 min read

By Seann Gallagher on Jan 30, 2025 11:45:50 AM

Streamline Operations, Improve Visibility, Enable Compliance, and Drive Success

In the highly regulated and fast-paced oil and gas industry, leveraging real-time, secure data is crucial for improving operational efficiency, ensuring safety, and meeting regulatory compliance standards. Software Toolbox delivers software solutions designed to enable data integration that is a must for the applications you use to monitor, manage, streamline and optimize operations across all sectors of the oil and gas value chain. Our solutions deliver the critical data you need, whether you're in upstream exploration, midstream pipeline management, or downstream refining. Read the rest of the blog to learn how we can help drive your operations forward.

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How to Simplify OPC Server Redundancy with Cogent DataHub

4 min read

By Kyle Persyn on Jan 29, 2025 7:23:36 PM

Redundancy is a broad concept, as explored in our Demystifying Redundancy Blog. In this post, we narrow the focus on how to manage redundant OPC servers—a critical topic for ensuring reliable process communications to your HMI, SCADA, MES, Historian, etc. Redundancy is crucial because it ensures continuous operation and data integrity in the event of system failures, minimizing downtime and potential losses.

Simply deploying two OPC servers connected to your PLCs doesn’t make them redundant. We're sometimes asked about having the two OPC servers communicate and decide when to failover. That sounds good but has a flaw. If the client loses network connection to one OPC server but the two OPC servers are still communicating, and the HMI/SCADA doesn’t have any internal failover mechanism, then no failover will occur.

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Video Tutorial: Logging Process Data to SQL Server with OPC Data Logger

2 min read

By Connor Mason on Jan 23, 2025 2:00:00 PM

You can make more confident and informed decisions when you have accurate and relevant data to base those decisions on. Operational data is crucial because it enables you to track performance, quickly identify issues, and make decisions based on up-to-date information, resulting in enhanced efficiency and effectiveness.

And in the current times of AI, Big Data, IoT, and countless other hot topics, many of the long-standing technologies that power many industries are left out of the limelight. For some users, the likeliness of OPC and SQL databases are well known and have been the basis for many simplified data collection projects. For others, there are still new and growing requirements to digitize data and interconnect a variety of sources into an easily accessible and manageable location. With Software Toolbox’s large variety of solutions we help both big and small companies alike meet their needs.

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2025 Automation & Control Software Learning Resources

10 min read

By Tanja Gehling on Jan 16, 2025 2:00:00 PM

Over the last several years, it has become a beloved tradition to start the new blog year with a review of the most popular content the team at Software Toolbox put together to build your automation software skills and empower your success. This is the 8th installment of this blog summary covering a wide variety of topics. But first things first: make sure you are subscribed to our blog. We publish new content at least once a week, and you have full control over the frequency of when you are notified.

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Demystifying Modbus Function Codes

6 min read

By Ryan Royse on Jan 9, 2025 2:00:00 PM

When working with Modbus communication, understanding the key concept of function codes is essential for ensuring efficient and accurate data exchange. Sometimes a device manual might only refer to the supported Modbus function codes and the range of offsets available for those function codes. A solid understanding of function codes is critical in achieving optimized performance and resolving potential communication issues.

After reading this blog, you'll know how you can leverage TOP Server’s Modbus driver to automatically handle the appropriate function codes for your application – while also taking advantage of its flexibility and other advanced features – to enhance performance, ensure compatibility with your devices, and reduce troubleshooting time.

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How to Seamlessly Connect Your Process Data to Amazon IoT Core

2 min read

By Kyle Persyn on Dec 19, 2024 2:00:00 PM

IoT, IIoT, MQTT, Big Data, and The Cloud—these tools and technologies are shaping the future of various industries. But how do you actually bring your critical process or control data into the cloud for real-time analytics, predictive maintenance, or smart manufacturing? That’s the most critical part, because in today’s connected world, data is power. Organizations are leveraging IoT and IIoT to optimize operations, predict maintenance issues before they happen, and unlock insights through advanced analytics in the cloud. That’s where Amazon AWS IoT Core and Cogent DataHub IoT Gateway come in.

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Prepared for DNP3 EFM Export from the Emerson FB Automation Platform?

5 min read

By Zachary Parham on Dec 12, 2024 2:15:03 PM

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.

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Reading from CONNECT Data Services with OPC Router

2 min read

By Nicole Knox on Nov 21, 2024 2:00:00 PM

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.

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We're engineers like you, so this blog focuses on "How to" appnotes, videos, tech team tips, product update announcements, user case studies, and other technical updates.  Subscribe to updates below. Your feedback and questions on posts are always welcomed - just use the area at the bottom of any post.

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