Software Toolbox Technical Blog

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This is Part 1 of our “25 Things to Consider when Choosing an OPC Tunnel” series. When choosing software applications to handle the tunneling of your data, there is more to making the right choice than simply a checkbox on a product datasheet that says “tunneling”. This series will introduce you to the considerations that will help you make an informed choice and choose the most effective tunneler for your specific application requirements. If you are unfamiliar with what an OPC tunnel is, please read our post “ Tunneling OPC Data – What Is It?”

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In today’s industrial operations environments, OPC is the standard of choice for interoperability between software and hardware in the multi-vendor real world. Major software applications that need data from other systems have implemented OPC client interfaces. Those same applications if they need to share data with others, have also implemented OPC server interfaces. Similarly, the OPC standard has allowed software vendors to write applications, called OPC Servers, which make it easy to access real-time data from any piece of equipment offered by any vendor.

Since 1995, the OPC Foundation estimates that over 30 million OPC server and client software applications have been deployed in operations management from the shop floor up through production and operations management layers. The result is that data from the factory floor is more available now than ever before.

The greater availability of data has generated greater demand for access to the data across a wider number of locations and users. However, getting that data from the factory floor to your systems and staff to monitor and act upon it has challenges.

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You may have heard the terms OPC tunnel or tunneling of OPC data before and not have known exactly what the terms meant. In this blog post, we will explain what people mean when they talk about an OPC tunnel or tunneling of OPC data. In order to explain what the terms mean, we need to first understand how OPC data is exchanged between an OPC server and an OPC client.

Barcode scanners are one of those types of devices that are extremely common in a variety of industries, whether it's for use in a manufacturing process or for cataloging inventory or a multitude of other possible uses.  But how do you go from scanning a barcode to making that barcode data available to your monitoring applications such as an HMI or a SCADA?

Over the years of working in the automation software realm, I've seen dozens of clients have this seemingly basic need to bring barcodes up into various software packages.  Regardless of the make/model of the scanner, the process is almost identical.  For example, you could connect to a DataLogic scanner in under five minutes. (Click for How-To Video)

This post will cover the steps for bridging that gap between your scanners and your client applications.

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Trends are moving towards making smarter operating decisions based on actionable information, whether you're in the manufacturing space, oil/gas, power/utilities or other industries where outside variables can substantially impact the bottomline.

Having access to current and historical information on all of those outside variables is key to having "smart" operations that maximize profits in the most efficient manner possible.

We're going to discuss several sources of such important outside variables that, in the past, may have been difficult to integrate into a control system such as an HMI, SCADA or MES and how they are now available in an easy-to-consume, JSON RESTful web services format.

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With the majority of companies in the oil, gas, railroad, water, wastewater, mining and power/utilities industries requiring wide area distributed radio networks for communications, engineers in charge of these radio networks have the daunting task of maintaining the highest level of performance and uptime at all times.

Given that you're reading this, I will choose to make the assumption that you are either an engineer in charge of such a radio network or that you've had some interaction on some level with such a radio network and it may not have been an altogether pleasant experience.

We're going to discuss a few things to keep in mind if you're interested in getting the most uptime possible out of your serial radios (and, let's face it, why wouldn't you want that).