HMI Selection

We looked at ignition edge as a low cost lots of bells and whistles HMI, but we just didn't have the resources in house to support all those OS's for our customers.
It is probably a great tie in to full ignition but we couldn't justify it.

You are probably easier just running an ignition client, unless you have sketchy network connections to your ignition server.

Buttons and pots is getting my vote for this one. Get your hands in a pair of their gloves and try to use your HMI. Operators love them, super reliable, no bells and whistles, easy to replace. Toss up between lamps and an ignition client for displaying info ( £100 pc and a £200 monitor, vnc ).

Try to convince them that the user experience is so important to the efficiency of the machine. Studying how operators interact with the machine and what information they need to do specific tasks can provide huge value. Thinking about production figures and browsing trends to find correlations is for the scada. Everything on the HMI should be task focused.

Yes, it is late over here. Good luck to the company, I hope they do well.
 
Isn't the PLC limited to only one PV5500 per CPU? Or is it only one PLC per PV5500?

I believe the PanelView Plus 7 and the PanelView 5500 are both limited to one PLC connection. Also, the PanelView Plus 7 can only do 50 displays (25 replace, 25 on-top) and 500 alarms. If you need more than 25 replace displays you may need to explore other options.
 
Ignition edge I had not heard of until now. I'll look into it because from a quick google, I'm intrigued and cautiously excited. If you've used it, can you give me a 30 second overview of your experience?

You would want the "Ignition Edge Panel" so you get the visualization. It's really just a stripped down version of Ignition, biggest complaint I have is the 500 tag limit, I think it's needs to be higher but from what you described might be more than you need. Note "Ignition Edge Panel" just means it includes a vision client license for visualization, you still need to source the panel/pc hardware. It's really only advantageous if you need to run stand-alone, or need a fallback solution should your network go down. Otherwise if you've got an Ignition unlimited install already:confused:
 
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Be sure you're comparing the PV+ 7 Standard and the PV+7 Performance separately, and that you have up-to-date info.

The Standard, for example, supports 50 screens and 500 alarms with FTView ME 9.0, while it supported only 25/200 previously.

The Performance models support multiple controllers and more displays, but I don't have the details at my fingertips.
 
You would want the "Ignition Edge Panel" so you get the visualization. It's really just a stripped down version of Ignition, biggest complaint I have is the 500 tag limit, I think it's needs to be higher but from what you described might be more than you need. Note "Ignition Edge Panel" just means it includes a vision client license for visualization, you still need to source the panel/pc hardware. It's really only advantageous if you need to run stand-alone, or need a fallback solution should your network go down. Otherwise if you've got an Ignition unlimited install already:confused:

Thanks Paully. The trick here is that the SCADA system won't go in initially, it's likely to be several months behind. So I'll need standalone control panels in the meantime. If I had an ignition edge panel license, and then later on bought the full ignition SCADA package, how easy would it be to integrate the edge panel into the rest of the SCADA?

Be sure you're comparing the PV+ 7 Standard and the PV+7 Performance separately, and that you have up-to-date info.

The Standard, for example, supports 50 screens and 500 alarms with FTView ME 9.0, while it supported only 25/200 previously.

The Performance models support multiple controllers and more displays, but I don't have the details at my fingertips.

Thanks Ken - yes, I'm familiar with the two different types and their limitations. For most of the applications that would use a standalone HMI, a Standard would probably do everything I need it to do - anything that really justified the Performance version would probably justify a SCADA client just as easily.

Have you had any experience with the PV5500's?
 
As far as use with cold, wet gloves - I'm not envisioning it being quite as bad as I perhaps made out. I'm thinking that most of the time, people will remove their gloves before they use the HMI, or at the very least wipe them dry first. It's not the sort of process where every single cycle you have to put your hands in the solution and then press go,

Our comments weren't based on the lack of information from yourself, but from our experience. Operators will not remove their gloves and all it will take is for one to use it with gloves and none of the others will ever remove them.
 
Thanks Paully. The trick here is that the SCADA system won't go in initially, it's likely to be several months behind. So I'll need standalone control panels in the meantime. If I had an ignition edge panel license, and then later on bought the full ignition SCADA package, how easy would it be to integrate the edge panel into the rest of the SCADA?

Ok gotcha, so it's really simple actually. The "edge" panels would become remote tag servers to your primary Ignition Gateway and off you go with SCADA development. The Edge project will be a different project from your actual SCADA project, but generally speaking from a development stand point it's all the same. You can import/export w/o much trouble at all.

There are management considerations, and "Enterprise Administration Module" should be considered to help integrate it all. If you went this route, I'd strongly suggest talking to an Integrator or contacting Inductive Automation directly so you fully understand licensing as it relates to your architecture/roadmap. Edge Panels complicate it because they are meant for small, stand-alone systems.
 
As I said before, you owe it to yourself to check out Maple System. Every HMI they sell is a MQTT Publisher, works get with Ignition (As the edge of network device).

Mr Arlen Nippers the co-inventer of the MQTT protocol and one of his programmers worked with me about 16 months back creating the Ignition Driver for Maple System.

Once the driver was finished using a Maple System Hmi with Ignition is a snap.

Very cost effective.

I can provide a detailed .PDF explaining the procedure. (Just ask and I will dig it out and post it)
 
Ignition Edge

The one thing I would note, the last time I looked at Edge it had a 500 tag limit. I know for very small things 500 tags would work... but at the same time I would find it hard to justify an HMI if a project is that small.
 
Ok gotcha, so it's really simple actually. The "edge" panels would become remote tag servers to your primary Ignition Gateway and off you go with SCADA development. The Edge project will be a different project from your actual SCADA project, but generally speaking from a development stand point it's all the same. You can import/export w/o much trouble at all.

There are management considerations, and "Enterprise Administration Module" should be considered to help integrate it all. If you went this route, I'd strongly suggest talking to an Integrator or contacting Inductive Automation directly so you fully understand licensing as it relates to your architecture/roadmap. Edge Panels complicate it because they are meant for small, stand-alone systems.

Great, thanks for the info. I'll touch base with IA and see what they can tell me

The one thing I would note, the last time I looked at Edge it had a 500 tag limit. I know for very small things 500 tags would work... but at the same time I would find it hard to justify an HMI if a project is that small.

Do you know if a UDT or AOI counts as one tag? All of my motors and drives and valves etc are all wrapped up in one AOI or UDT, so if only the UDT/AOI itself counts as a tag, 500 tags would probably do the job for the most part.

As I said before, you owe it to yourself to check out Maple System. Every HMI they sell is a MQTT Publisher, works get with Ignition (As the edge of network device).

Mr Arlen Nippers the co-inventer of the MQTT protocol and one of his programmers worked with me about 16 months back creating the Ignition Driver for Maple System.

Once the driver was finished using a Maple System Hmi with Ignition is a snap.

Very cost effective.

I can provide a detailed .PDF explaining the procedure. (Just ask and I will dig it out and post it)

Thanks VAN, that might be an interesting read! I've used a maple HMI before, but not for probably 5-10 years. Interested to see what they're up to now
 
Crimson 3.1 is nearly identical to 3.0 except there is no emulator and they added some flashy graphics and textures.

Don't forget the upgraded web server. That's a big improvement...

Re the missing emulator, the problem was that it didn't operate reliably on 64-bit operating systems, to the point where it was becoming a pain to support and maintain. There's work going on to provide a replacement. Watch this space...
 
Don't forget the upgraded web server. That's a big improvement...

Re the missing emulator, the problem was that it didn't operate reliably on 64-bit operating systems, to the point where it was becoming a pain to support and maintain. There's work going on to provide a replacement. Watch this space...


That is very VERY good to hear. I use the heck out of the emulator, even with its quirks. I even go so far as to develop in 3.0 even when the target hardware is CR series or Graphite before converting to 3.1 just so I can get the comms and appearance details all ironed out with the emulator.

I have not taken advantage of the upgraded web server, since my older apps with Graphites are still running 3.0 and the only CR series I have done have been the 1000 series which don't support it.

I noticed the latest build includes OPC-UA server, but did not find much by way of documentation...I suppose a comprehensive guide is coming shortly?
 
There's a chapter in the manual on the OPC-UA server.

There are also a few videos posted on Red Lion's YouTube channel e.g. the one linked at [1] below.

And there's a video I created a while back linked at [2] below.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1TL61BHLOJQ
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vzia7E1rySA

PS: I just noticed the C3.1 manual on Red Lion's website is out of date, and doesn't contain the chapter. The version installed with the software should be correct, and I've prodded them into updating the one on the site. Hopefully that will be fixed soon enough...
 
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Do you know if a UDT or AOI counts as one tag? All of my motors and drives and valves etc are all wrapped up in one AOI or UDT, so if only the UDT/AOI itself counts as a tag, 500 tags would probably do the job for the most part.

I remember asking this and it was basically, DINT, INT, BOOL all counted as a tag.

So, you could get away with a DINT as a single tag DINT.0 to DINT.31 (this isn't technically supported from memory) but an array of boolings BOOL[32] would be 32 tags.

So, Arrays, UDT, or AOIs wouldn't cheat the 500 tags.

This all could have changed but when edge first came out that 500 limit was a pretty big limit as a main HMI.
 
Makes it hard to standardise on HMI, if moving to a 600 tag machine means shelling out the £12k or whatever for full ignition. You could always do some clever packing to get your count down, but that's not the good kind of engineering.

For us, we wanted to have a PLC track the status of products along a conveyor. We use about 500 tags for that alone at the moment...

Plus with smart machines these days where every sensor has about 50 tags it will send over IO link (serial number, date of production, temperature, number of cycles...), You are kind of limiting yourself to a 8 sensor machine. Or a dumb machine, in which case, why are you considering ignition?
 

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