Software Toolbox Technical Blog

It is common for companies to use databases for long-term storage of their critical information.  In our experience, we also see machine setup information, short term operational data and much more besides traditional historical data put into shop floor databases in the operations technology or “OT” world.

Over on the business side or the “IT” world, everything somehow ends up in a database: Production plans, forecasts, orders, it’s all there.  Increasing business demands and IT/OT convergence are driving more real-time integration between these databases and control systems.

This blog discusses some of the key reasons users like yourself need this information and then shows how the DataHub can help move this data from a database to your control systems via OPC DA, OPC UA, Modbus and other interfaces or protocols that are common in the automation layer.

I’m excited about the recent release of the OPC Data Client development toolkit – and you should be too if you’re an active developer of custom OPC Client software applications. This post is highly technical, but hopefully our developer readers will find it useful.

We’ve been working with the OPC software interoperability standards since 1996, and it’s easy to forget that others who are new to this space often find the whole discussion around the OPC standard and all the different standards confusing. 

So you've been tasked with bringing data from a new device (maybe a weigh scale or barcode scanner or RFID system) into your HMI/SCADA system.  But you just have a protocol document from the manufacturer.  And for this new device, there is no existing, off-the-shelf connectivity driver or server available.

So what now? Do you contact a custom software development house?  That gets very expensive and time-consuming very quickly.

This post, the first of three, goes through what to look for in that protocol document from the manufacturer to know how to begin using OmniServer to integrate your device without requiring custom code in a fast, affordable manner that provides industry-standard client interfaces such as OPC DA and UA.

What's "It"?  The "it" can mean a lot of things. What we mean is solving software and information integration challenges the way YOU want to solve them, and not being totally limited by the fill in the blank configuration settings in software. 

Whether you are a system integrator or a sophisticated user, you know there are times where fill-in-the form software configuration makes things easy, but can also constrain you.  Whether it's scability of large configurations, enhancing existing product features to satisfy YOUR NEEDS, or even adding functionality to a product, you don't like being limited by fill-in-the blank software.  

The most powerful functionality of the Cogent DataHub is its balance between fill-in the blank quick configuration for most users, and the freedom to "Get it YOUR WAY" for others.  Cogent DataHub does this through the free scripting engine that is included in every license. 

Does your data logging software force you to define the location where you're logging your data ahead of time?  Wouldn’t it be nice if your logging software could evaluate your data and make a decision on where the data should be logged?

In this first of two posts in a series on dynamic SQL logging, I'll show you how the OPC Data Logger can easily be configured to switch between SQL Tables at runtime, reducing any post-log sorting you have to do in SQL and saving you time and effort in the process.

A Topic Variable is a flexible special OmniServer element that gives you the ability to define a device specific variable such as a Device ID at the OmniServer topic level.  This effectively makes your OmniServer protocol reusable for those devices using the same protocol, since you can now specify the value of the variable when creating the OmniServer topic instead of creating a protocol for each device with the value hard coded.

In this video blog, I show you how to get the most from your OmniServer by using topic variables with your protocol to reduce your engineering time and effort to create an OmniServer protocol.

Redundancy can mean a lot of things, as discussed in our Demystifying Redundancy Blog post.  In this blog post we want to focus more specifically on one of the use cases in that blog post:  managing redundant OPC servers.  Just having two OPC servers talking to your PLC’s does not make them redundant.  Most OPC Servers don’t have built-in methods of knowing there is another redundant OPC server instance out there.

Some HMI/SCADA systems support redundancy but sometimes it involves scripting and other custom written code.   So, in many cases, you need supplemental software to manage and optimize the connections to your two OPC servers.  Your OPC client then talks to the redundancy management software as if it is the actual OPC server.

This blog post covers some of the considerations and watch outs when choosing how to manage your OPC server redundancy.  After that we will also discuss how the Cogent DataHub can help manage your redundancy to provide high availability for your OPC server communications.