Software Toolbox Technical Blog

Your organization has a custom developed application that performs important tasks, and you need to provide access to that software from an HMI, SCADA, Historian, MES, or other system acting as an OPC UA Client. Adding an OPC UA server interface to a custom application that either you've developed or that you've taken over from someone else can be a daunting task. This is especially true if you're unfamiliar with the low-level details of the OPC UA specification.

Accelerate OPC UA Server Development with the OPC Wizard Toolkit

The OPC Wizard UA Server Development Toolkit addresses this reality head-on by providing a rapid development framework that handles the underlying OPC UA nuts and bolts for you. In a recent webinar we covered how to add an OPC UA Server interface to a custom .NET software application using OPC Wizard, without having to become an “OPC wizard” yourself.

Rather than spending hours on end diving into the specifications and debugging protocol details, you can utilize simple read, write, and subscribe methods, resulting in less engineering time and faster ROI.

As technical consultants at Software Toolbox, we are often approached by users who need to expose data from a software application they have written, or are writing, to communicate from systems they own to a client, HMI/SCADA, or historian. And, in many cases, there are dozens of applications at different sites that the data needs to reach. The question we are then presented with is, “how can I accomplish this quickly and efficiently while staying within budget?” 

Our hope is to answer this question and share from our experience with OPC since 1996, what our users have told us are the common reasons why they chose to use a commercial OPC server toolkit, and to help readers determine what factors to consider for their specific situation and circumstances.

In a previous blog post, we covered the basics of commercial OPC client development toolkits, with a dive into the benefits of using one, while here in part 2, our focus is on OPC server development toolkits. If you read our blog on OPC client toolkits, you will likely notice a clear overlap in the benefits you gain from using both types of commercial OPC toolkits.