Software Toolbox Technical Blog

By now, you’ve probably heard that TOP Server V7 has officially landed. Maybe you’ve seen the announcements or caught a quick overview along the way. But if you find yourself wondering, “Okay, but what does this release actually change for me?” you’re in the right place.

While V7 continues to reinforce the stability and reliability TOP Server is known for, this release also introduces several important enhancements aimed at strengthening enterprise deployments, simplifying user management, and modernizing system compatibility. Whether you’re operating on the latest infrastructure or maintaining long-standing environments, V7 delivers meaningful improvements that make deployment more flexible, secure, and future-ready.

Let’s take a closer look at what’s new.

In the ever-growing digital landscape of manufacturing operations, single use solutions & applications may solve issues, but also create their own data silos. These silos present multiple challenges (limited visibility, slower decision-making, security blind spots) and lead to missed opportunities due to the complex management of varying solutions. For example, OPC HDA is a standard utilized for collecting and sharing historical data across industrial automation technology solutions. Based on the standards of OPC DA, integration challenges arise due to the dependency of COM and remote DCOM connections, creating incompatibility with newer solutions and technologies.

Today we'll explore how Cogent DataHub was used to solve many of these integration headaches and silos by providing a middleware platform for connectivity between a variety of protocols and technologies. With the latest major revision of Cogent DataHub V11, the ability to collect historical OPC HDA data is now possible with the addition of the OPC HDA Client capability.

Your organization has a custom developed application that performs important tasks, and you need to provide access to that software from an HMI, SCADA, Historian, MES, or other system acting as an OPC UA Client. Adding an OPC UA server interface to a custom application that either you've developed or that you've taken over from someone else can be a daunting task. This is especially true if you're unfamiliar with the low-level details of the OPC UA specification.

Accelerate OPC UA Server Development with the OPC Wizard Toolkit

The OPC Wizard UA Server Development Toolkit addresses this reality head-on by providing a rapid development framework that handles the underlying OPC UA nuts and bolts for you. In a recent webinar we covered how to add an OPC UA Server interface to a custom .NET software application using OPC Wizard, without having to become an “OPC wizard” yourself.

Rather than spending hours on end diving into the specifications and debugging protocol details, you can utilize simple read, write, and subscribe methods, resulting in less engineering time and faster ROI.

While Halloween and this time of year offers a few good scares, our customers in manufacturing face year-round nightmares that are far less fun: connectivity issues that stop production and unreliable data collection that restricts their ability to make informed decisions.

When your SCADA system can't communicate with your PLCs, your MES is missing critical data, and your operators are working without visibility into what's actually happening on the production floor, you're dealing with the kind of problems that lead to unplanned downtime, missed targets, and lost productivity.

In this post, we'll run through how our TOP Server handles common connectivity challenges, cover some practical tips for getting the most out of your setup, and show you how using remote configuration tools can simplify management across multiple servers, which all enable you to focus on production instead of troubleshooting communication nightmares.

OmniServer is a universal data acquisition application designed to bi-directionally exchange data with a wide range of Ethernet, serial, or USB devices that use “non-standard protocols” such as weigh scales, barcode readers, lab instruments, inspection machines, printers, and more.

The wide range of connectivity options enable OmniServer to send that data to HMI, SCADA, MES, or Historian systems using standard interfaces like OPC DA, OPC UA, and AVEVA SuiteLink. It also has an optional MQTT Client Plug-In that allows users to publish data to MQTT Brokers.

Since 2016, LGH File Inspector has been the trusted tool for AVEVA™ InTouch HMI users who need quick, reliable access to their historical data. Whether it’s pulling files from network drives, automating queries with batch files, or setting up scheduled reports, the Software Toolbox team has helped users integrate LGH File Inspector into a wide range of solutions.

In this post, I have collected and summarized tools and learning material to ease your experience in applying LGH File Inspector and help you get started quickly. Towards the end you will find the highlights of the webinar I hosted covering the new features of LGH File Inspector Version 4, that addressed several issues users previously faced.

Downtime is expensive — sometimes costing thousands of dollars every minute, a line sits idle. Traditional maintenance approaches often fall into one of two traps: reacting after something breaks or replacing parts on a set schedule whether they need it or not. Predictive maintenance takes a smarter route. By combining real-time data from your equipment with machine learning, it can spot problems before they cause an outage. With OPC Router, you can efficiently route PLC and sensor data into predictive models with minimal complexity.

As technical consultants at Software Toolbox, we are often approached by users who need to expose data from a software application they have written, or are writing, to communicate from systems they own to a client, HMI/SCADA, or historian. And, in many cases, there are dozens of applications at different sites that the data needs to reach. The question we are then presented with is, “how can I accomplish this quickly and efficiently while staying within budget?” 

Our hope is to answer this question and share from our experience with OPC since 1996, what our users have told us are the common reasons why they chose to use a commercial OPC server toolkit, and to help readers determine what factors to consider for their specific situation and circumstances.

In a previous blog post, we covered the basics of commercial OPC client development toolkits, with a dive into the benefits of using one, while here in part 2, our focus is on OPC server development toolkits. If you read our blog on OPC client toolkits, you will likely notice a clear overlap in the benefits you gain from using both types of commercial OPC toolkits.