Hello,
We are a group of technicians trying to setup a network to read info off our our PLC's. We have 5 large cyclotrons all controlled through HMI, some use Ntouch some use RSlinks. We have a lot of experience as technicians, and we have always wrote our own software but have never set up anything quite like this. We are the type who like to measure twice and cut once so I'm hoping someone here may be able to see any flaws in our logic on putting this together.
We want to be able to access some info from each machine from the PLC's and from several excell spreadsheets and CSV files. We want a different screen for each machine bringing in its data to be monitored/displayed.
We plan on setting up 5 different computers running windows 7 on a simple file sharing network. We are going to use OPC Data.Net to talk between the PLCs and one of these computers. We plan on writing our software in VB.net to create our interface. One computer will store all of the data we need in a shared folder to allow the other computers to access it as they need. We plan on about a total of 100 inputs from the PLCs and it also needs data from two different spreadsheets and a CSV file. We hope to have all of this data reading in real time.
Our concerns, having never actually built something like this, are as follows:
1. Will this set up lag badly? If so, what's the best thing I can do to fix that?
2. Will Windows 7 be able to handle everything we need it to do? (company doesnt use server)
3. Is there something we missed that will stop us dead in our tracks?
4. Are we being silly using VB.net to do this? Would a more traditional HMI language be better(i.e. ntouch)
We are a group of technicians trying to setup a network to read info off our our PLC's. We have 5 large cyclotrons all controlled through HMI, some use Ntouch some use RSlinks. We have a lot of experience as technicians, and we have always wrote our own software but have never set up anything quite like this. We are the type who like to measure twice and cut once so I'm hoping someone here may be able to see any flaws in our logic on putting this together.
We want to be able to access some info from each machine from the PLC's and from several excell spreadsheets and CSV files. We want a different screen for each machine bringing in its data to be monitored/displayed.
We plan on setting up 5 different computers running windows 7 on a simple file sharing network. We are going to use OPC Data.Net to talk between the PLCs and one of these computers. We plan on writing our software in VB.net to create our interface. One computer will store all of the data we need in a shared folder to allow the other computers to access it as they need. We plan on about a total of 100 inputs from the PLCs and it also needs data from two different spreadsheets and a CSV file. We hope to have all of this data reading in real time.
Our concerns, having never actually built something like this, are as follows:
1. Will this set up lag badly? If so, what's the best thing I can do to fix that?
2. Will Windows 7 be able to handle everything we need it to do? (company doesnt use server)
3. Is there something we missed that will stop us dead in our tracks?
4. Are we being silly using VB.net to do this? Would a more traditional HMI language be better(i.e. ntouch)
