"Home made" SCADA

Hello guys,

Few days ago a big company in my country published a job offer. Job is to automate a machine i one of theirs factories. It's a small job, few motors, 10 analog signals and that's it. SCADA is only visualization of process.

We are trying to give best offer, almost work for free just to start working with that company. We are thinking to build our own VB.net or Visual C SCADA application just to cut price for 500EUR (WinCC 128 tags license).

PLC will be Siemens S300 or similar Omron.

Does anybody have experience with "home made" OPC SCADA just to tell me how hard is it. Does it pay off to work like that or it too complicated.

Thx.

Can you create what you need for €500 worth of effort- seems highly unlikely to me.
I think it would only be cost effective if you were going to sell dozens or more.

Originally posted by Lesa:

We are trying to give best offer, almost work for free just to start working with that company.

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If this is your intent then treat it completely as a sales tool. Use the standard SCADA package (WinCC) and just sell it at whatever price it takes to be competitive. It will be a more maintainable solution and will leave a better impression with your customer. Sooner or later your customer will ask you why you gave them a SCADA they can't maintain. Unless you can give them a very good technical reason it will be obvious you tried to go with the cheapest out-of-pocket solution. That's not the impression you want to leave with a potential customer.

Keith

Does anybody have experience with "home made" OPC SCADA just to tell me how hard is it. Does it pay off to work like that or it too complicated.

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Yes I have experience with it, it's easy after you've done it a few times!! But its not easy to make it robust and worthy of a customer that you are trying to impress. Spend the 500EUR. If it was a matter of 10-20K then maybe I would think about it.

If the SCADA is "only for visualization of process" and you don't need the ability to log production data, then you should not need to purchase a tag-based SCADA software license nor the computer to run it on. You can do process visualization and operator control with a small HMI panel as long as the HMI can communicate with the PLC.

If you do decide to go with SCADA software, remember that many of them have lower prices for a run-time license than for a development license. Your compnay will have to invest in a development license with which you create the process visualization screens. You also purchase a run-time license for each system you sell to a customer. I have no experience with WinCC, so I don't know whether or not they follow that model.

Thank you all guys for answering,

But, I don't want to talk about money and competitive business, I told you whole story by the way.

Few months ago I wrote VB script in WinCC that communicates with MATLAB and do some optimization. That was synchronous COM communication.

I want to talk about VB or VC++ asynchronous COM communication with SIEMENS or OMRON PLC through PROFIBUS network.

Does anybody have some experience? Maybe some sample code?

Thank you!

Hi Lesa.

You said that you wanted to undercut the WinCC Flex RT 128 tags license cost. Thats what the other guys responded to. I agree with their conclusion. It is impossible to do it cheaper than the WinCC Flex 128 tags license. I also agree with that to get long-term support (10+ years) it is hard to compete with the big guys support and development.
By the way, you CAN do datalogging with WinCC Flex even without the archives option.

It sounds more like you have other reasons than to undercut the cheapest comercial HMI offering.
You may want to take a look at Libnodave. I believe it can be used with both VB and C++.