Realy OT wierd question

I know this is a off topic, wierd question to ask, but figure if it can or has ever been done, someone on this site would know.
Was just giving a demo on how to use kepware and connect to a plc.

In the next week or so we are going to have someone from indusoft and some others come in and demo what they have after some meetings today, and that was how this question came up.
- Is there a way to use something like frontpage to create a webpage and created a animated gif and use data from a excel file for the animation.
we are just now getting into wanting to go out and pull data from the different plcs, slc500, micrologix, omron, siemens just to name a few and put that in a web page format for upper management to look at.
And that was when our director asked us if it was possible to use info from excel and create a web page with something like frontpage and animate the gif with the data from the excel file.
To be honest, we thought he was joking, but then he scheduled another meeting for later this week and wants a answer, and i have no idea if its possible, that why i ask it here.

thanks

This is possible but you are in the realm of VB or C++ programming with .net configurations.

So you are wanting a webpage that goes back to an excel file and pulls data and populates the webpage (ie animation, etc)? Is the data in the excel file coming from the PLC's?

If so, you better route may be a database that holds the information then using scripting do it from there.

Look at Rockwell Automation's VantagePoint.

Maybe it is overkill, but Inductive Automations FactoryPMI is used to display OPC data from 'anywhere' in a web browser.
I think this is much better than going via Excel.

Thanks
Here is what we have played with so far as a experiment with some ab plc's.
We used kepware to read data from plc registers and put them in a excel file as bargraphs, etc., then in excel set it up to automatically save the file every 1 minute, then changed under tools, options under transition, set it to save it as a web page. Pretty neat, but the guy working on this is not sure that excel can be set up to run as a service and automatically start on a windows 2000 server machine.
Just something we played with. Just getting into trying to pull data, next week a rep from indusoft is coming in, its just company wants data, but as usual does not want to have to spend much money. Without know vb then packages like indusoft seems like a pretty good option.

irondesk40 said:

Thanks
Without know vb then packages like indusoft seems like a pretty good option.

Click to expand...

You may be surprised at how easy it is to do some of this in VB. You can actually do some of it with free software. The only thing that would cost is the communication drivers for some of the PLC's. This can give you a start if you wanted to give it a try:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CiPzqc5jDlE

thanks, lots of good video

IronDesk40,

Let me start by noting I work for InduSoft.

I am not sure if you have been visited by the InduSoft person yet, but I will try to answer your post here.

First of all, when using InduSoft you don't need an OPC server to connect to the PLC's you mentioned. There are built-in drivers for all of the brands of PLCs you noted. And, you don’t have to purchase a different OPC server for each PLC you want to communicate to.

Second, if you do need a driver that is not built-in, InduSoft can use an OPC server (such as Kepware) for communications. There is even an import tool to import variable names (Tag names) from the OPC server into InduSoft.

Next, publishing as web pages is easy (only slightly oversimplified here): A mouse click saves the screens as html. Then configure the IP address of your data and web server (they can be independent but don’t have to be). Start your web server and set up the default folder. Point Internet Explorer at the web server IP address and done.

Other built-in features: Redundancy, data is bidirectional, screens can auto scale, multi-language, security, and each browser can be viewing a different screen!

InduSoft can support up to 128 browsers at the same time (Internet Explorer)

With this solution, you don’t have to re-invent the wheel and you don’t have to maintain the “programming” side of this. It’s the data you want not the headache of supporting the hard coded solution.


Hope this helps

Thanks
Have not been visited by anyone from Indusoft yet, what we are going to do is take a look at what a integrator who did some work for us in the past has done with indusoft as a starter.