Oliver

Freeware SCADA comparison

11 posts in this topic

Hello!

 

I am a SCADA beginner with no realistic experience and knowledge. All I know are the basics. At the moment I am writing a paper about freeware, shareware etc SCADAs. I want to compare different SCADA programs and then, according to their different aspects and benchmarks (user interface, features etc), make some kind of review about freely available SCADA programs.

 

What are the things I should know doing this kind of research? Can you recommend me some considerable  SCADA programs? What are aspects I should concentrate on while doing the comparison? Any kind of advice is warmly welcome.

 

Thanking you in advance

Oliver

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The first thing you need to know is that with SCADA Software you get what you pay for.

In this field the less you pay for the software and licenses to use that software the more time will be spent implementing, writing, troubleshooting, and getting the software to communicate to all of your devices. 

As in life there is no such thing as a "Free Lunch". YMMV

 

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22 hours ago, RussB said:

In this field the less you pay for the software and licenses to use that software the more time will be spent implementing, writing, troubleshooting, and getting the software to communicate to all of your devices. 

As in life there is no such thing as a "Free Lunch". YMMV

 

Yeah, I strongly disagree with the first statement.

PeakHMI, is full featured, is very easy to use and is low cost (compared to other HMIs with similar feature sets).

And yes, I am associated with PeakHMI.

 

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I both agree and disagree with @RussB and @Mark-! Yes, in many cases you get what you pay for, however exception do occur.

However, they are both discussing paid (more or less) money for products. To be honest I've never heard of a SCADA system that is totally free. So @Oliver; do you have any examples of SCADA freeware/shareware? A fully featured SCADA system is quite a lot of components, so I have a hard time believing that someone actually makes a free fully featured SCADA application. I would be very interested in trying/testing such a system, so please provide one or more examples.

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First one needs to define what they consider to be SCADA and what they consider to be HMI. The two are similar but different. There are a couple of low cost HMI software packages and at lease one 'Free' one that I know of but they all come far from being considered SCADA in my humble opinion.
Here is a very good no cost HMI package.

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There are a number of free software packages. For example:

 

http://rapidscada.org/

http://pvbrowser.de/pvbrowser/index.php

http://openscada.org/

http://www.scadabr.com.br/

http://www.advancedhmi.com/

 

The only one I can speak for is AdvancedHMI because I am the chief architect behind it. It is unique in that it is based on Microsoft Visual Studio. It is essentially an extended tool set that allows you to create HMI applications without the need to write any code. Since it  is built on .NET and Visual Studio, it has the advantage of being infinitely extensible by creating additional components, beyond what already exists in the toolset. These can be created with any .NET language of choice. When it comes to the question of whether something could be done with AdvancedHMI, since it not limited by a canned development environment, the true question should be how easy it is to do a particular task with AdvancedHMI.

Although its primary purpose has been intended for an HMI, many users have used it as a SCADA application. The .NET environment also has the advantage of being able to leverage the millions of .NET developers that exist. If a prebuilt component does not already exist and you do not know how to create one, it is easy to find a developer that can create it for you.

So to compare the various packages, here are a few questions to consider:

- What kind of learning curve is required to get started?

- How difficult is it to achieve a particular task?

- How is the support? Is there community support such as with a forum?

- What hardware and OS will it run on?

- What PLCs/devices does it support with its communication drivers?

 

Edited by arj3090
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@arj3090 Thank you very much for this information. Guess I was stuck in my old habits. Will surely check out these.

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Hi Oliver, for your "review" I would recommend you to look at  https://www.myscada.org/ especially product part . Their websites are understandable and  helps me know scada quite well - you can download the development software tool for free and try it and you can also download mobile app for free to try (limited by tags) . 

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nice to know, thanks

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I'm SCADA beginner. Never use before for the SCADA software was mention by @arj3090. Good to know and I would like to try. Thanks!

My first SCADA project was developed by using ECAVA IGX Web SCADA. Ecava IGX has impressed me when use it on first time. It's easy to use and I can view the mimic on my smartphone & tablet without install anything at all. Furthermore, the image on mimic is SVG and it won't have image pixelated problem when enlarged.

I will highly recommend to all the SCADA beginner because it's easy to use and do not need spend a lots of time for project development. For the SCADA expert user, you can try on this Ecava IGX Web SCADA to check out how the different with the SCADA software that you used before. Below is the their official website link

https://www.integraxor.com/

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On 25. 2. 2016 at 2:12 PM, Oliver said:

Hello!

 

I am a SCADA beginner with no realistic experience and knowledge. All I know are the basics. At the moment I am writing a paper about freeware, shareware etc SCADAs. I want to compare different SCADA programs and then, according to their different aspects and benchmarks (user interface, features etc), make some kind of review about freely available SCADA programs.

 

What are the things I should know doing this kind of research? Can you recommend me some considerable  SCADA programs? What are aspects I should concentrate on while doing the comparison? Any kind of advice is warmly welcome.

 

Thanking you in advance

Oliver

Hi Oliver!

I have made a list of thing you should look at about scada last month. Hopefully it could help you decide... K

How to choose SCADA KL.pdf

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