Software Toolbox Technical Blog

The engineering definition of redundancy is “the inclusion of extra components which are not strictly necessary to functioning, in case of failure in other components.” In the Industrial Automation space, redundancy is critical. Not planning for redundancy can easily result in vulnerability to financial losses due to unexpected downtime. There are multiple types of redundancy in the industry. In this blog, we will be covering “Media-Level Redundancy”.

With the release of the OPC Data Client 2023.1 toolkit, custom OPC client developers will benefit from improvements targeted at platform support, developer productivity, and custom application end user productivity.  If you missed the OPC Data Client 2022 releases, be sure and read what we added to OPC Data Client in 2022. As always, OPC Data Client license holders on an active support and maintenance agreement are entitled to free upgrades.

As a continuation of our Tech Support Corner blog series, this post will look at how to set up a query in LGH File Inspector, how to export LGH data, and some of the configurable options available in LGH File Inspector. 

In this video blog post, Jeff Knepper from Flow Software and I engage in a discussion about the issues that users and integrators often face. Drawing from our experience, we dive into the challenges we've noticed in assisting manufacturers to reconsider and redesign their strategies in building robust data infrastructures, essential for scaling their analytic solutions. Join us as we explore these topics and more in this 46-minute video blog post.

OPC Router is a standards based tool for data integration from the shop floor through all levels even up to ERP systems, with a visual workflow engine, scalable configuration templates, and integration to many OT and IT systems. Leveraging OPC UA, REST, SOAP, MQTT and more, it can be an essential enabling tool for your Industry 4.0 applications. Solutions can be extended using C# scripting, and this blog shows a live built example of how to efficiently use Visual Studio to build those scripts. 

In today's blog post, I reach out to you in tribute to Kevin M. Rutherford, our dear friend and colleague. 

It is with an exceptionally heavy heart that I am writing to share that Kevin passed away suddenly and unexpectedly on May 14, 2023. Our compassion, love and support go out to his wife Jennifer, Kevin's family, their friends and extended family at this time of loss. Last week, we held a week of silence on this blog in honor of Kevin. This week we felt moved to honor Kevin here, the place many of you heard from him regularly and share what he meant to us, partners, & clients around the world. Bear with us, as we have a lot to say, but we loved Kevin and he will be missed forever. 

Having expectations, for both oneself and others, plays a vast role in motivation, success and the overall experience one has in virtually any situation. As can be expected, when you're reaching out to the technical support team of any company, there's a good chance you're already in a state of some distress, potentially. As such, an empathetic ear and technically proficient hand on the other end of the line can go a long way to making your day better.

Software Toolbox takes great measures to ensure that all employees are equipped to provide exceptional support and we hold ourselves to a high expectation when delivering solutions to your technical problems. We put ourselves in your shoes wherever possible to understand the stressors motivating your call so we can do our best to deliver. This blog post will highlight some key benefits of working with Software Toolbox.

JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is a file format that has become fairly common in the industrial automation industry for storing data or information (including such things as configuration files). But also as one of the most common data formats used by RESTful APIs and web services, which are commonly used for providing a range of useful information including energy prices and weather data.

Sometimes, of course, depending on the application, some or all components of JSON packet might be variable or dynamic in nature, which can make it difficult for off-the-shelf industrial software solutions to properly parse the information from those packets.

In this post, I will cover step-by-step how to leverage the scripting capabilities of the OPC Router to access and parse JSON packets either from a JSON file saved to a specific file directory or from a RESTful web service after which that data can be used with any of the other connectors that OPC Router supports. For this example, we log the data to a SQL database.