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Lupo

What is your best solution?

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Hi all, We have 6 new machines being installed, all using ControlLogix or MicroLogix controllers. We need to be able to create some graphics so the business side of the operation can see some data in real time. Pretty standard stuff for some of you I hope. Some of our HMIs are AB with Factory Talk installed and some are Beck Automation S II. I see quite a few options here (Factory Talk Clients, Webservers, etc.) and am leaning toward webservers. From what I've read that would involve installing webservers in all the controllers. The Beck HMIs have built in webservers but the Factory Talk don't. Red Lion HMI's would have solved all my problems but I got on board too late for that. I'm from the Process Control world where this is second nature (Honeywell TPS/Experion) but am relatively new to this side of things. (I was shocked to see control being done in the HMI software...a no no in my old field). Any help will be appreciated. Rob PS. Oh ya, to compound things the ethernet link from the production building to the office is slooooooow. Working on getting a fix in the budget for Q3, but am not hopeful. So there's that...

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Dollar for dollar a Red Lion is going to be the most cost effective solution. For the CLX boxes you can import the LK5 file into the RL and, as you know, build a little panel to display CLX data. I'm not sure about the Micrologix boxes. Maybe a RL or maybe just read data from the Micrologix with a CLX over ethernet (GetMsg) and serve the data from the CLX to the RL. Control and alarming with an HMI is a no no... I don't care where it is... jmho

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Some of your FactoryTalk installations might be able to be upgraded to provide Web services via the ViewPoint extension. It's essentially a Microsoft Silverlight server that allows display of HMI screens in a browser. While edition (SE Distributed, SE Station, ME, PV+) are you using, and which version (4.0, 5.0, 5.10, 6.0 ) ?

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I have View Site Edition Version 5.10.00 Further investigation has shown that all the data I need is in the HMI, none in the PLC. I don't need to see any screens currently available in the HMI, I need to customize the data I collect. If I go with your proposed solution would I have to make the screens with View Studio, in the HMI, and then serve them (as opposed to simply reading tags out of the HMI remotely)?

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I would love to go Red Lion, but is not an option at this stage. As well, I have now found out that all the data i need is in the HMI, none in the PLC. Madness.

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That's definitely caught my interest: The data you need is "in the HMI" but isn't already on any HMI display ? That suggests to me that you're being asked to create a new display function that displays data elements from a historical log, from an alarm log, or from a derived tag. Yet in your first post you said that you're being asked to show data "in real time" to web browser users. If you pursued using ViewPoint, you would create your Displays right in FactoryTalk View Studio, and use the FTView SE Servers as the web servers. If you chose to use a third piece of software solely to create browser-accessible reports or displays, you'd probably need to run FactoryTalk Gateway on your FTView SE servers to allow data that's only resident in the FactoryTalk databases to be accessed via OPC. It sounds like an interesting challenge from where I'm sitting, which is probably only because I'm not being asked to actually do it !

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If you are, or have access to, a .NET developer, it would be relatively simple to build an ASP.NET web application to serve up ControlLogix data to web pages in real time using Automated Solutions ASComm.NET driver as the interface to the ControlLogix. The ASComm.NET trial download comes with a simple web example project to demonstrate. Refer to Downloads> Allen Bradley> Demo Software> A-B Ethernet Driver for .NET

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