Software Toolbox Technical Blog

There are several useful updates available with TOP Server V6.2.  In case you missed it, I did a high-level post giving you an overview of the four biggest features from the V6.2 release - click here to see that post.

Today, I'd like to give you a more detailed review of the current model support available in the Mitsubishi Ethernet driver in TOP Server V6.2.  Keep reading to find out about new device model support and previous read and write performance enhancements that also apply for these newest models of Mitsubishi controllers.

Do you have a multitude of non-standard devices with unique identifiers such as a Device IDs or Node IDs that must be sent as part of all protocol messages to communicate with each device?  If so, you could certainly accomplish this by hard coding your Device/Node IDs as part of each message in your OmniServer protocol and simply have a separate protocol for each device.

But OmniServer has a better way:  Topic Variables.  In this sixth post in our “OmniServer Did You Know?” blog series, you'll learn how to use Topic Variables to create one flexible protocol that you can use across any number of devices using the same communication protocol.

The Wellsite Information Transfer Specification (WITS) is a communications format used for the transfer of a wide variety of wellsite data from one computer system to another.  This oil/gas industry standard is recognized by a number of companies internationally and is supported by many hardware devices and software applications used at well sites around the globe.

In this video blog, I show you how to get started using our software based communications driver for WITS Level 0 Active protocol to integrate data from your wellsite devices into Wonderware applications. You can install the software on your own computer and it will communicate with multiple devices via multiple serial ports and/or Ethernet convertors. 

Does your non-standard instrument connected to your COM1 serial port refuse to communicate without being told how? Do you need to tell the instrument what bank of memory to use before you can extract any data? Does the instrument require setup parameters before it will work? Do you not want to script this in your client application, and don’t want to expect a user to manually initialize a device before doing anything else?

With OmniServer, there is an auto-activated message flag that's exactly the feature you have been looking for when communicating with your non-standard devices and instrumentation.  This fifth post in our "OmniServer Did You Know?" blog series focuses on how to use OmniServer's setting for auto-activating a command protocol message to initialize communications with your device automatically on startup.

There are some great new updates now available with TOP Server V6.2.  In case you missed it, I did a high-level post giving you an overview of the four biggest features from the V6.2 release - click here to see that post.

In this post, I'll give you a more detailed review of the updates to the new CODESYS Ethernet driver in TOP Server V6.2.  Used extensively by controller manufacturers when creating custom firmware isn't scalable, CODESYS continues to grow in usage globally. Keep reading to find out more about specific features of the CODESYS Ethernet driver.

A common question I run into when talking to OmniServer users is "How can I gain more visibility into what is going on with my OmniServer."  After all, a primary concept for an OPC Server is to be invisible – to be a transparent converter between the protocol used by a device, and that used by your SCADA or HMI (i.e. OPC, Wonderware SuiteLink, etc.).

While there are a number of answers to how you can be more aware of what is going on with your system, this fourth post in our "OmniServer Did You Know?" blog series focuses on the importance of system tags, and specifically how they can be used in the OmniServer to query the health of the server as a whole, as well as individual device connections.

You've probably received one of my emails or possibly heard from a colleague about the latest TOP Server released on June 8 – so you may have a general idea of the key new features in the TOP Server V6.2 release.

In this blog, I'll go through the biggest four features released in V6.2 in more detail and how they benefit you as a TOP Server user.

As you likely already know, OmniServer is primarily used to retrieve information from devices that use ‘non-standard’ protocols to communicate such as weight scales, barcode readers, and printers.

But were you aware that OmniServer, as part of that function, is capable of specifying a default initial value for data items on startup?  In this third post in our "OmniServer Did You Know?" blog series, keep reading to find out how to use initial values for your data items in OmniServer and under what situations that will be important.