Software Toolbox Technical Blog

Welcome back to our Data Storage Deep Dive series, where we have been exploring the possibilities of integrating our variety of industrial automation software solutions with historians to allow for a deeper understanding of trends within your data. In our previous installment, Software Toolbox Helps You Fly Higher with Canary Historian, we demonstrated how TOP Server, OmniServer and DataHub can collect data from unique sources with different communication needs to Canary Data Historian for aggregation and analysis. Today, we are going to look at how OPC Router can be used to extract the historical data and expose it in an intuitive format for any OPC UA Client to consume.

Welcome to the kickoff post of our Data Storage Deep Dive blog series! In this series, we will explore the crucial role of data storage solutions and Historians in industrial automation. Over the coming weeks, we’ll be looking into how solutions delivered by Software Toolbox can be utilized with Historians, helping you make the most of your industrial data.

Though you may have never needed to contact Software Toolbox for support, it’s always smart to be ready for any challenges that might arise. That’s why it’s helpful to know the resources you have at your disposal, should you ever need to connect with our experienced support team to overcome any challenges when using our solutions.

At Software Toolbox, we are committed to providing our users with timely and high-quality responses to their support incidents. While your question or issue might not always be completely resolved after the first response, you can expect to receive our initial response within 2 regular business hours after submitting a question, although it often happens much sooner! We even have some tools that can help speed up this process.

As a part of our Tech Support Corner blog post series, this blog post covers how the OPC Router’s Application Report helps us help you by allowing you to provide much of the information that we need to troubleshoot issues when you initially contact us.

As OPC UA has grown in it's adoption, more device vendors are implementing OPC UA interfaces on their PLCs and other devices to increase interoperability. OPC UA has been proven to be an adaptable specification with its ability to accommodate industry-specific nuances in data formats, leading to implementations that expose information in ways that make practical sense.

As a middleware solution, OPC Router implements a variety of OPC UA features outside of the generic Data Access profile to cast a wide net for devices it can support.

Welcome back to our Summer of IoT blog series! We hope that last week’s introduction to the series created excitement as we continue to explore how our IoT solutions can help you achieve even greater success with your Industry 4.0 and Digital Transformation initiatives.

In today's video blog, we will be integrating REST with MQTT by using OPC Router to connect to a RESTful API service and publish data to HiveMQ's MQTT Broker. Although we will use a public webservice to illustrate the concept, the steps we take would be the same for any OT or IT data source that can serve data via a RESTful web service/API.

Welcome to the kickoff of Software Toolbox’s Summer of IoT blog series! Over the next few blog posts, we’ll discuss how our products can play a role in the exciting world of Internet of Things (IoT), but more importantly, how they can be used to further your success in Industry 4.0 and Digital Transformation initiatives. The IoT landscape has grown exponentially over the past decade, transforming industries by connecting devices, systems, and people in unprecedented ways. IoT is reshaping how we interact with technology. At Software Toolbox, we recognize the power of IoT and are committed to providing solutions that facilitate this technological revolution.

In the ever-changing landscape of industrial control, the ability to establish connections and facilitate efficient data exchange between different technologies is crucial. With digital transformation, the industry requires robust integration solutions more than ever before. If you’ve been keeping up with our previously released OPC Router blogs, you're already aware that OPC Router is a flexible middleware solution that provides an array of functionalities for exchanging and integrating data across different technologies. It facilitates seamless interoperability by acting as a connection point between various data sources, protocols, and applications such as OPC DA/Classic, OPC UA, databases, REST, ERP, SAP, and more with a visual workflow editor, templates, and imports for scalable configuration.

If you are new to OPC Router and want to learn more, our OPC Router Learning Resources are a great place to get started.

Knowing when your systems are online and functional is key to the success of your business. In large operations, it could be someone's full-time responsibility to mitigate problems and fix them when they inevitably occur. This makes it critical for the right people to be alerted in a timely fashion so they can take corrective action. To facilitate this need, what if you could also have real-time updates from your process and other systems through email notifications? Rather than rely on human detection and reaction, what if your actual processes and business systems could message you via email when a connection goes down (possibly a critical system is down, or a tank is approaching a critical level)?

In this blog post, we'll cover the steps necessary to use OPC Router V4 to integrate your variety of connections with email notifications, empowering you to stay informed about downtime occurrences and expedite critical decision-making processes for your business.

Software Toolbox’s solutions play a pivotal role throughout multiple renewable energy sectors. However, our solutions don't only help with the day-to-day creation of renewable energy but also the supply chains that enable the creation of these energy sources, reducing cost and increasing efficiency across all levels of your business via automation.

Last week, we shared a specific use case of how our software is being used to help reduce waste and energy usage. In this final post of our Environmental Sustainability series, we will explore additional ways our software can be, and has been, used across the entire automation pyramid to reduce waste and increase efficiency. Chances are, this is something you are already very familiar with. But for those of you who are not, the automation pyramid functions as a conceptual blueprint utilized in industrial automation representing the different levels of data transfer necessary for automation. This pyramid likely aligns with the different areas within your business.