Software Toolbox Technical Blog

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The use of certificates in cryptographic applications and online communication protocols is nothing new and can practically be traced all the way back to the 1970's when the "framework" for public key encryption (more on this in a future blog) came into being. With the (now-not-so-recent) Industry 4.0 movement coming out of Europe, and the design and operation changes brought about by the IIoT phenomenon, we are seeing more and more systems – that have traditionally been air-gapped and kept offline – being brought online to take advantage of the digital revolution in which we find ourselves.

Despite how you feel about this (r)evolution there are several exciting changes that are being brought about, including the one I want to discuss is the increased adoption of OPC Unified Architecture (OPC UA) in automation systems.

In this first post in our ongoing Exploring OPC UA blog series, we will look at what OPC UA Certificates are and what they provide and subsequent posts will further explore how they are used in OPC UA, how they fit into the security ‘stack’ of OPC UA and will then look at how OPC UA Certificates are utilized and managed in several Software Toolbox applications. First thing’s first however; what are OPC UA Certificates and what are they used for?

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With the recently released 2019.2 (5.56) version of the OPC Data Client Toolkit, developers of OPC UA custom client applications can now add the latest extension to the OPC UA specifications, PubSub, short for Publish-Subscribe, to their applications. This version also brings items of value for developers of any type of OPC client application, and also highlights some updates from a 2019.1 release we did last month to prepare for this big release.

In this blog post, we will cover the most significant updates to OPC Data Client and how they will benefit you and your custom OPC client projects.

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If you're unfamiliar with state based control, it's a process automation design that essentially defines that all process facilities should operate in a recognized, definable state with previously defined normal and abnormal conditions with defined actions for each.  State based control is intended to allow company's in virtually any process industry to greatly reduce factors of human error and inconsistency, significantly increasing the efficiency of all processes.

In this blog post, we cover how a large chemicals manufacturer migrated to state based control using OPC UA and increased their efficiency, production levels and profitability as a result.

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In recent years, many of our users have let us know they are adopting the latest Siemens technology, particularly S7-1500 controllers.  And, with that adoption of those controllers, users have been asking for connectivity via the symbolic optimized block addressing.  So we added a Siemens Plus Suite to enable connectivity to new and legacy Siemens devices.

This post focuses specifically on the general steps required to integrate S7-1500 controllers by connecting to their embedded OPC UA server using TOP Server for AVEVA.  

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For many industries, where having access to process data is critical, it's common to implement redundancy on many levels to ensure there is no disruption to data collection.  While there are different levels of redundancy, the one we see users most interested in is with OPC data source redundancy.

The following short video blog demonstrates step-by-step just how easy it is to configure the Cogent DataHub to handle redundant failover between OPC UA data sources, OPC DA data sources and more.

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You may or may not be aware that our technical support team at Software Toolbox maintains, updates and adds new content to an extensive knowledge base built from answers to all of your questions from over the years.  We like to frequently review which of our knowledge base articles have been used the most to see what users like you need help with and what is most relevant.

Continuing our Tech Support Corner blog series, this blog post covers the why's and how's of using the popular and powerful network analysis tool called Wireshark as an additional tool in your troubleshooting arsenal.

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You've likely already heard about Cogent DataHub and it's MQTT integration capabilities.  The DataHub MQTT Client goes beyond just generically connecting to MQTT Brokers by providing smart connectors for Azure IoT Hub, Google IoT and Amazon IoT Core MQTT Broker services.

The following short video blog demonstrates step-by-step how to easily configure the DataHub MQTT Client for publishing OPC UA and OPC DA data from DataHub to the Azure IoT Hub, as well as, pushing data from the many other data sources supported by Cogent DataHub (such as ODBC, DDE, Modbus and more).

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As you are likely already aware, Cogent DataHub Version 9 expanded the assortment of data sources you can integrate to include IIoT (Industrial Internet of Things) with MQTT (Message Queuing Telemetry Transport) support.  As with its many other supported data sources (such as OPC), DataHub V9 can act as both a "client" and a "server" for MQTT - with a "server" being an MQTT broker.

The following short video blog demonstrates how truly easy it is to configure the DataHub MQTT Broker for acting as a "gateway" between MQTT Clients in your IIoT cloud and other supported interfaces including OPC, DDE, ODBC and many other data sources.