Software Toolbox Technical Blog

If you’ve worked with OmniServer before, you’re probably familiar with its pivotal role in extracting data from devices that use a 'non-standard' communication protocol. These devices encompass a range of equipment, such as weight scales, barcode readers, and printers, connected via either serial or Ethernet interfaces. OmniServer helps you bring data that would otherwise be inaccessible into your process and business systems, helping you make more effective decisions. OmniServer does all this at a lower cost and greater reliability than traditional custom solutions.

In this blog, we will be exploring the components that make up the OmniServer Configuration and explain what they do and how each component can be used for successful communication to your device. The main OmniServer Configuration Window is broken up into two sections: Configuration and Diagnostics. Our focus for this post is the Configuration portion and digging into Devices, Protocols, Topics and Clients.

Today's industrial automation users have a need for fast, responsive, easy-to-configure Human Machine Interfaces (HMI) that can economically deliver a rich user experience and make sure critical plant production information can be securely accessed by everyone in their organization from anywhere at any time.

Cogent DataHub® WebView™, a feature offered within the Cogent DataHub IT/OT data integration software, is an advanced HMI solution tailored to seamlessly integrate with your live data streams and eliminate any delays typically associated with HMIs that are dependent on databases. As a comprehensive solution that combines real-time data delivery, a robust web server, and an HMI designer into a self-contained package, DataHub WebView provides an excellent alternative for those seeking a cutting-edge HMI for process monitoring without committing to a significant investment in a complex SCADA system.

DataHub is a solution in Software Toolbox’s portfolio of software that integrates various IT and OT data sources, and is particularly strong in working with a wide range of OPC standards, secure multi-layer data tunneling, databases, historians and more. If you've ever worked with DataHub, you've probably seen the "Scripting" tab shown in the image below with some sample scripts. Perhaps you've wondered what this scripting can do or were curious about the language that DataHub scripts use. With that in mind, in this week’s blog we will cover the "what" and "why" of scripting in DataHub, and point you to "where" you can find more resources of "how" to take advantage of the DataHub scripting engine, included free with all DataHub licenses.

Storing process data almost always comes with varying project requirements, making it difficult for users to find solutions that cater to specific configuration needs. Luckily, the wide variety of configurable functionality in OPC Data Logger allows for creating unique projects to fit your needs.

In a prior blog post regarding redundancy, we learned how critical it is to plan for redundancy in the Industrial Automation space. We covered how the TOP Server Media-Level Redundancy Plug-In  facilitates duplicate or backup systems used to maintain reliable communications with the critical components in your environment which in turn minimizes data loss and increases the availability of your critical industrial data.

If you're a SLIK-DA/UA OPC Server development toolkit user with your own custom OPC UA Server applications or have worked with any of our other OPC UA enabled solutions, you may have noticed properties or configuration options in your software by the name of Local Discovery, Discovery URL, Discovery Servers, or Discovery Domain. Clearly, there is a recurring theme here of “Discovery”. Taking this even further, you may also have a Windows Service running on your PC called “OPC UA Local Discovery Server” (LDS), but we often encounter users who don’t know what a UA Discovery Server is, how to leverage it with their custom SLIK-DA OPC UA Servers, or why they should even consider it. Proper usage and implementation of an OPC UA Discovery Server will make it easy to find and connect to your UA Servers from your UA Client software applications such as HMI, SCADA, MES, & Historians if they also support OPC UA Discovery.

Tags, nodes, points, items, symbols – in our industry, we often see these terms thrown around, but in most instances, we’re all talking about the same thing. From the TOP Server OPC Server's perspective, we refer to them as tags. A tag is an OPC Server software application’s representation of a device address to use for communication. This is how your HMI, SCADA, MES, historian, or other client application is able to consume data. If you’re a TOP Server user, you know that you are required to configure tags to get data from your device, but did you know there are multiple options of how to accomplish this?

Have you ever wondered why certain features in TOP Server work the way you experience them, or how something might work in certain scenarios?  Well this blog post tries to answer a few of those type of questions!

Anyone that has used TOP Server before has had to make edits to the configuration. While TOP Server allows changes to many settings while actively collecting and serving data, and makes it simple, there are things to consider to avoid disrupting operations. TOP Server has certain restrictions in place when making configuration changes, and while potentially frustrating, these are for your benefit and security. For example, perhaps you have tried to make a certain change, but observed that the setting immediately changes back and “doesn’t stick”. Or maybe you’ve logged onto your machine and were unable to make any configuration changes at all. Why is that?