Software Toolbox Technical Blog

DataHub is a solution in Software Toolbox’s portfolio of software that integrates various IT and OT data sources, and is particularly strong in working with a wide range of OPC standards, secure multi-layer data tunneling, databases, historians and more. If you've ever worked with DataHub, you've probably seen the "Scripting" tab shown in the image below with some sample scripts. Perhaps you've wondered what this scripting can do or were curious about the language that DataHub scripts use. With that in mind, in this week’s blog we will cover the "what" and "why" of scripting in DataHub, and point you to "where" you can find more resources of "how" to take advantage of the DataHub scripting engine, included free with all DataHub licenses.

Round-trip InfluxDB Integration using OPC Router

Software Toolbox offers a variety of tools for integrating with InfluxDB.  Today we focus on OPC Router, a solution that enables visual workflow integration of traditional OT data sources with time-series databases such as InfluxDB.  The InfluxDB connector provides for reading and writing to InfluxDB (local or cloud-based). OPC Router's workflow engine provides visual data mapping, for ultimately extracting analytics and results from InfluxdB and making them available to the plant floor in OPC UA (or other) format.

In a prior blog post regarding redundancy, we learned how critical it is to plan for redundancy in the Industrial Automation space. We covered how the TOP Server Media-Level Redundancy Plug-In  facilitates duplicate or backup systems used to maintain reliable communications with the critical components in your environment which in turn minimizes data loss and increases the availability of your critical industrial data.

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.

Tags, nodes, points, items, symbols – in our industry, we often see these terms thrown around, but in most instances, we’re all talking about the same thing. From the TOP Server OPC Server's perspective, we refer to them as tags. A tag is an OPC Server software application’s representation of a device address to use for communication. This is how your HMI, SCADA, MES, historian, or other client application is able to consume data. If you’re a TOP Server user, you know that you are required to configure tags to get data from your device, but did you know there are multiple options of how to accomplish this?

Have you ever wondered why certain features in TOP Server work the way you experience them, or how something might work in certain scenarios?  Well this blog post tries to answer a few of those type of questions!

Anyone that has used TOP Server before has had to make edits to the configuration. While TOP Server allows changes to many settings while actively collecting and serving data, and makes it simple, there are things to consider to avoid disrupting operations. TOP Server has certain restrictions in place when making configuration changes, and while potentially frustrating, these are for your benefit and security. For example, perhaps you have tried to make a certain change, but observed that the setting immediately changes back and “doesn’t stick”. Or maybe you’ve logged onto your machine and were unable to make any configuration changes at all. Why is that?

LGH File Inspector for AVEVA InTouch (formerly Wonderware) enables easy, scalable, fast access to local daily historical data files (*.lgh files) logged by AVEVA InTouch applications without the limitations imposed by other solutions. There are many advanced features in the product and options for automating queries to run without user interaction to generate reports, exports, and more.  

When working with OPC Router, especially as you build larger and more powerful projects to integrate OPC, web services, databases, ERP, SAP, and other systems in your Industry 4.0 initiatives, it’s good to have an idea of the underlying operations of the application. That knowledge can empower you to get the best results from the software’s many connectors and visual workflow engine.  If you’ve never heard of or are new to OPC Router, we invite you to explore the OPC Router website and view the OPC Router Getting Started Virtual Training Video.