Dashboard Softwares

Darkshrimp

Member
Join Date
Mar 2011
Location
WA
Posts
20
Hoping to get some suggestions from the crowd regarding a software we can use to create good looking dashboards that gets data from PLCs.

Here is what we have tried:

Thingsworx and Ignition, both of these platform's licensing structure is too much for our end client.

Thingsboard, the price is right, but seems to be still a working in process platform. Running into a lot of bugs and getting it to talk modbus to the PLCs have been not a smooth process.

What we are looking for in terms of platform:
- Ability to quickly and easily communicate with PLC
- Trending and Reporting functionalities.
 
NodeRed can produce some pretty interesting dashboards almost out of the box. NodeRed can also be used as the glue to get that data into a DB and then use Grafana to display dashboards. All of these are available for free on the interwebs.
 
Ignition would be perfect with Perspective. What costs are too high?

How many clients do you need to have open at a time? You could get an "Limited" license to make the costs a lot cheaper.
 
Ignition would be perfect with Perspective. What costs are too high?

How many clients do you need to have open at a time? You could get an "Limited" license to make the costs a lot cheaper.

Maybe i didn't understand their licensing properly? But I need to deploy an instance per client, and looking on their website, after adding everything i needed (trending, reporting, etc), i'm looking at $24k.
 
Our IT uses Power BI. Several dashboards on the plant floor and our Intranet site that are displaying data from PLCs (Rockwell and Beckhoff).
 
NodeRed can produce some pretty interesting dashboards almost out of the box. NodeRed can also be used as the glue to get that data into a DB and then use Grafana to display dashboards. All of these are available for free on the interwebs.

I like this option!!
I started with this Node-Red, InfluxDB and Grafana a few weeks back. I am impressed! I've spent a lot of time and money to get software that can't do half of what Node-Red can. It's a bit to get used to, but it really is powerful in moving data around and talking to PLCs.
 
The only criticism about Grafana is that it's geared towards IT monitoring and not typical process trending where you may want to zoom in and out of a sequence of events. This being said, it's still more functional that GE's Historian for example.
 
Maybe i didn't understand their licensing properly? But I need to deploy an instance per client, and looking on their website, after adding everything i needed (trending, reporting, etc), i'm looking at $24k.

You really should talk to a sales engineer, they can explain the structure better. You pay a lump sum for a server instance, connection modules, reporting module, drivers, etc. Additional instances (concurrent connections) are a minimal cost and can be added/removed on the fly. You only need one instance of a server, as long as your PLC/data sources can connect to the same server.
 

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