I attended a workshop today at one of our distributors on the Redlion G3. I left a little mad at myself over the amount of money that I have poured down the drain on HMIs, hardware network translators and software OPC servers over the years. Redlion has made an incredible product that shows a lot of potential of becoming even better.
One project that we have been discussing in our facility recently will probably be resolved for 10s of thousands less than we had been discussing if I can prove a couple of things functionally which is where this post comes from.
We have been discussing how to improve our data acquisition from our control networks and moving that data into our business side SQL server installation. From what I saw today the G3 data acquisition units will fit the bill perfectly as long as I can prove to things.
1) That two ethernet ports in the unit are completely isolated so that nothing can get from the internet connected business network into the the isolated control network. This seemed to be a pretty straight forward non-issue from what I saw.
2) That we can prove and handle a success or failure of the SQL transaction to maintain our data integrity. This seemed a little more convoluted on how I would determine if the transfer was successful and clear out my existing data logs only if the transfer completed. The functionality I know I will need to prove is a success full write followed by a internal log clear, if a failure occurs do not clear logs and issue notification in some fashion that the SQL transfer failed so the issue can be resolved before the internal log is full and any data is lost. I saw that there is a log file generated that could be parsed but what I was really hoping to see was the ability to launch a program immediately upon the response from the SQL server. If anyone has any suggestions on how I can prove this out I would greatly appreciative.
My first impression was that this was a great product and I saw visions of how with a little more functionality added that it could become a distributed, modular and computer-less SCADA system. I walked in thinking this would be yet another machine level HMI class and left thinking that the HMI functionality was only an added bonus of this hardware. If I could figure out how to make it talk to our Reliance Automax heads in our DC Drives it would save hundreds of thousands of dollars on our modernization plans.
Good Job Red Lion
One project that we have been discussing in our facility recently will probably be resolved for 10s of thousands less than we had been discussing if I can prove a couple of things functionally which is where this post comes from.
We have been discussing how to improve our data acquisition from our control networks and moving that data into our business side SQL server installation. From what I saw today the G3 data acquisition units will fit the bill perfectly as long as I can prove to things.
1) That two ethernet ports in the unit are completely isolated so that nothing can get from the internet connected business network into the the isolated control network. This seemed to be a pretty straight forward non-issue from what I saw.
2) That we can prove and handle a success or failure of the SQL transaction to maintain our data integrity. This seemed a little more convoluted on how I would determine if the transfer was successful and clear out my existing data logs only if the transfer completed. The functionality I know I will need to prove is a success full write followed by a internal log clear, if a failure occurs do not clear logs and issue notification in some fashion that the SQL transfer failed so the issue can be resolved before the internal log is full and any data is lost. I saw that there is a log file generated that could be parsed but what I was really hoping to see was the ability to launch a program immediately upon the response from the SQL server. If anyone has any suggestions on how I can prove this out I would greatly appreciative.
My first impression was that this was a great product and I saw visions of how with a little more functionality added that it could become a distributed, modular and computer-less SCADA system. I walked in thinking this would be yet another machine level HMI class and left thinking that the HMI functionality was only an added bonus of this hardware. If I could figure out how to make it talk to our Reliance Automax heads in our DC Drives it would save hundreds of thousands of dollars on our modernization plans.
Good Job Red Lion
