You've probably either received one of my emails or possibly heard from a colleague about our latest TOP Server release – so you may have a general idea of the key new features in the TOP Server V6.3 release.
In this blog, I'll go through the top 3 key features released in V6.3 in more detail and how they benefit you as a TOP Server user.
There are some nice, time-saving updates available in TOP Server V6.2. In case you happened to miss it, I did a high-level post shortly after the release giving you an overview of the four biggest features from V6.2 - click here to see that post.
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.
There are several useful updates available with TOP Server V6.2. In case you missed it, I did a high-level post giving you an overview of the four biggest features from the V6.2 release - click here to see that post.
Do you have a multitude of non-standard devices with unique identifiers such as a Device IDs or Node IDs that must be sent as part of all protocol messages to communicate with each device? If so, you could certainly accomplish this by hard coding your Device/Node IDs as part of each message in your OmniServer protocol and simply have a separate protocol for each device.
But OmniServer has a better way: Topic Variables. In this sixth post in our “OmniServer Did You Know?” blog series, you'll learn how to use Topic Variables to create one flexible protocol that you can use across any number of devices using the same communication protocol.
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.
Does your non-standard instrument connected to your COM1 serial port refuse to communicate without being told how? Do you need to tell the instrument what bank of memory to use before you can extract any data? Does the instrument require setup parameters before it will work? Do you not want to script this in your client application, and don’t want to expect a user to manually initialize a device before doing anything else?
With OmniServer, there is an auto-activated message flag that's exactly the feature you have been looking for when communicating with your non-standard devices and instrumentation. This fifth post in our "OmniServer Did You Know?" blog series focuses on how to use OmniServer's setting for auto-activating a command protocol message to initialize communications with your device automatically on startup.
There are some great new updates now available with TOP Server V6.2. In case you missed it, I did a high-level post giving you an overview of the four biggest features from the V6.2 release - click here to see that post.
