Software Toolbox Technical Blog

Knowledge is power and knowing the current state of your underlying server hardware for your process can be very powerful indeed.  Keeping a pulse on information like CPU usage, available memory, memory consumption by a process and whether or not critical process are still running can be the difference between hours of downtime with thousands of dollars in lost production and being able to proactively avoid any downtime.

The following short video blog demonstrates step-by-step how easy it is to use the Cogent DataHub to monitor vital system statistics on your servers that can be shared in real-time via supported client interfaces such as OPC DA and OPC UA or even send email/SMS notifications.

Timely notifications about abnormal conditions in your process are vital to minimizing downtime and the costs associated with it.  Automating the process based on the condition of specific process variables gets you the information you need for making decisions as quickly as possible.

The following short video blog demonstrates step-by-step how easy it is to use the Cogent DataHub to establish a connection to an OPC data source and then define various flexible conditions for triggering email and/or SMS text notifications based on values collected from that OPC server.

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A Topic Variable is a flexible special OmniServer element that gives you the ability to define a device specific variable such as a Device ID at the OmniServer topic level.  This effectively makes your OmniServer protocol reusable for those devices using the same protocol, since you can now specify the value of the variable when creating the OmniServer topic instead of creating a protocol for each device with the value hard coded.

In this video blog, I show you how to get the most from your OmniServer by using topic variables with your protocol to reduce your engineering time and effort to create an OmniServer protocol.

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A Register Number is a time-saving special OmniServer element that allows you to configure one item that is requesting the same type of memory or offset in a device instead of one item for each memory or offset location.

In this video blog, I show you how to get started using registers to more efficiently build an OmniServer protocol without having to manually create an item for every piece of data whenever possible.

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The Wellsite Information Transfer Specification (WITS) is a communications format used for the transfer of a wide variety of oil & gas wellsite data from one computer system to another.  This oil/gas industry standard is recognized by a number of companies internationally and is supported by many hardware devices and software applications used at well sites around the globe.

In this video blog, I show you how to get started using our TOP server software based communications driver for WITS Level 0 Active protocol to integrate data from your wellsite devices into AVEVA (formerly Wonderware) applications. You can install the software on your own computer and it will communicate with multiple devices via multiple serial ports and/or Ethernet convertors. 

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With the release of Cogent DataHub Version 8, we have had a lot of interest in new USB camera support functionality. The following short video blog demonstrates step-by-step just how easy it is use the Cogent DataHub to establish a connection to a USB Camera and then securely tunnel that data to another computer and then create a DataHub WebView page that will allow you to view the camera image and control the camera remotely.

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With the release of Cogent DataHub Version 8, we have had a lot of interest in OPC UA connectivity. The following short video blog demonstrates step-by-step just how easy it is to make an OPC UA connection between two DataHub nodes while also demonstrating how to manage security certificates in DataHub when making OPC UA connections.