Software Toolbox Technical Blog

With OPC DA Classic having been the de-facto standard for integrating industrial automation systems for so many years, I'm sure there are quite a few of you who might have custom developed OPC DA servers using SLIK-DA. Now, of course, migrations to OPC UA are on the rise with its enhanced security, encryption and efficiency.

Of course, the prospect of replacing that OPC DA server entirely with a replacement that supports OPC UA might be less than ideal. But have you considered adding an OPC UA server interface to that existing OPC DA custom application?

In this video blog, we teach you how to add an OPC UA Server interface to your existing OPC DA Server interface using the SLIK-DA/UA rapid development toolkit with your custom software application (NO ADDITIONAL CODE). If you missed our last post on how to add an OPC DA interface to your custom software, click here.

So your organization has a custom developed application that is performing some important task and you've been tasked with providing access to that software for an OPC DA client or clients. Adding an OPC DA 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 nuts and bolts of the OPC DA Classic specification.

In this video blog, we teach you how to add an OPC DA Server interface to your custom software application using the SLIK-DA/UA rapid development toolkit.

2020 was an extraordinarily challenging year for the world and, as a result, a phenomenally transformational year in manufacturing as industries worldwide had to adapt to succeed in the face of new challenges. 

We start each year off, in the spirit of a new year, with sharing references to learning resources that users have told us were the most helpful to them over the course of the last year. This year's post contains an extraordinary amount of virtual technical training opportunities.

With the recently released 2020.3 (5.59) version of the OPC Data Client Toolkit, developers of OPC Classic client applications can now use .NET Core and have more flexibility in managing optimizations in their applications. Developers using OPC UA PubSub have more methods and options to aid in their development.  More example programs will help new users get started faster or existing developers leverage other functionality in their applications.

In this technically hot blog post, we will cover the release highlights with links to documentation, and, as always, the full detailed release notes are available in our knowledge base.

TOP Server for AVEVA™, formerly Wonderware provides connectivity to hundreds of device types and protocols, but that's not all.  With the TOP Server OPC Client Suite, it's also possible to use your existing classic OPC DA and OPC XML-DA servers with OPC UA clients.

In this video blog, I'll show you how to make a secure OPC UA connection from OPC UA clients supporting the Data Access profile to TOP Server for integrating process data from OPC DA Classic servers using the TOP Server OPC DA Client driver.  I cover the basics of connecting to your OPC DA server and making an OPC UA connection using an OPC UA test client.

If you're following our blog posts on integrating XML data, we're discussing methods our tech support team suggests when asked how to integrate XML (eXtensible Markup Language) data with other systems such as OPC clients or servers, databases, devices or even the cloud.

Continuing this discussion on Integrating XML Data (part of our continuing Tech Support Corner blog series), this post covers how to integrate XML data with a variety of other systems including OPC clients and servers, databases, IIoT and more using the OPC Router. 

If you've read our other posts on sharing XML data, you'll remember that our tech support team regularly gets asked how to integrate XML (eXtensible Markup Language) data with other systems such as OPC clients or servers, databases, devices or even the cloud.

Continuing our discussion on Integrating XML Data (part of our continuing Tech Support Corner blog series), this post covers how to integrate XML data with a variety of other systems including OPC clients and servers, databases and more using the built-in scripting engine and interfaces of Cogent DataHub. 

If you read our last post on sharing XML data, you may recall that our tech support engineers are regularly asked how to take data provided in an XML (eXtensible Markup Language) format (file or data stream) and share it with other systems such as OPC clients or servers, databases, devices or even the cloud.

In this Integrating XML Data sub-topic of our continuing Tech Support Corner blog series, this post covers how to easily integrate XML data with OPC systems when designing a custom developed application.