Moving on from FTView

For the past several years I have been working primarily with FTView and AB HMIs and have been able to get quite proficient with them. Recently, however, for various reasons I started working with an alternate HMI with an eye toward moving away from AB's offerings and I'm liking the way this is going. Now I have one more reason.

Last week, we ran into some issues where we had to restore old backup files for an HMI in an older piece of equipment (one of 13 upgraded about 6 years ago) and found our current software version (8.10) was incompatible with the archived HMI file version (5.10). What was needed, the sofware told me, was to do a "Legacy Database Conversion".

If you've ever had to do this, you know how pleasant it is.

First you have to acquire a 32bit PC/laptop with a working copy of FTView Studio on it. (Fortunately for me, I had one. Not that the IT Department had willing let me keep it, I was just lucky enough that they forgot about it.) From there, it took no less than twelve (12) steps and most of the morning to accomplish this conversion.

It's done now, and everyone is basically happy, but gee whiz, I got other things to do, too. In any event, I'm moving on from FTView. IMHO there are a lot more user-friendly offerings out there.

Just sayin.

Yes, it was stroke of genius to convert there HMIs to the same format as RSView/FTView. Not!

Have you ever called Tech Support and gotten, "Well that is weird, I don't know why it is doing that", or "Hmmm, I don't have that error on my list". It kind of gives me the impression they don't really understand how it really works.

I am batting about 500 for Tech Support actually resolving my problem, and I am probably being generous.

Stu....

A long long time ago someone tried to convince me to try Red Lion in place of Painelviews. About ten years later I finally gave it a shot. Now I have the luxury of using them exclusively.

For PC based HMI and SCADA I try to use Ignition. I am about to start on my third Ignition project, so by no means am I an expert, but I really like the way it performs. They really put a lot of thought into the design to make things easy and flexible.

I have no complaints about Rockwell support and I still use their PLCs as much as possible.

OkiePC said:

I have no complaints about Rockwell support and I still use their PLCs as much as possible.

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Yeah, I really like RSLogix5000 and that generation of PLCs, too. Not so much the MicroLogix or SLC500 - too limiting for my taste.

I was thinking more of the FTView Support when I made that comment.

I definitely agree on AB PLCs. The ControlLogix is great, they keep getting faster and cheaper, and there lots of specialty cards available for them. The CompactLogix not so much IMHO.

The MicroLogix has its place in small applications, we keep getting them in OEM Machines. The SLCs were great when they first came out, but are getting pretty long in tooth now, I still work on quite a few though.

Stu....

Steve Etter said:

for various reasons I started working with an alternate HMI

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What HMI did you choose to go with?

OkiePC said:

A long long time ago someone tried to convince me to try Red Lion in place of Painelviews. About ten years later I finally gave it a shot. Now I have the luxury of using them exclusively.

For PC based HMI and SCADA I try to use Ignition. I am about to start on my third Ignition project, so by no means am I an expert, but I really like the way it performs. They really put a lot of thought into the design to make things easy and flexible.

I have no complaints about Rockwell support and I still use their PLCs as much as possible.

Click to expand...

I downloaded the demo of Ignition to play around with. The only thing I don't like is that it's Java-based. I hate Java. Java-based apps work until Java updates (which seems to happen 50 times a day) and breaks something or makes something funky with security.

That said, I did get it installed and working fairly quickly. I was impressed that the download is only 300 or so megabytes, as opposed to 2.6 Gigabytes for FactoryTalk View Studio.

At first I was suspicious of it being web-based, but after playing around with it and only reading a few help files I had a working screen connected to an emulated PLC up and running within 30 minutes of starting it for the first time. I really like how it is very modular in how you purchase it, and the unlimited clients, controllers, and tags is nice, too.

I use C-More HMIs a lot. For what you pay, they're really powerful, and the software is really easy to use.