Software Toolbox Technical Blog

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.

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.

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.

If you are familiar with the OmniServer, you probably already know that it can be used to retrieve information from devices that use ‘non-standard’ protocols to communicate – typically these are your weight scales, barcode readers, and printers.

However, did you know that the OmniServer can also retrieve data that are exposed via web services, or even websites?  Keep reading to find out you can "scrape" web sites or services to integrate useful information into your systems using OmniServer.