Now would be a good time to disclose that I'm not an employee of, but do contract work for Inductive Automation - I've been hooked since I helped them develop software in college, then went of to the military. Here's a short video that
demonstrates logging data to an SQL database with FactorySQL. If you're interested, they'll answer all your questions during a
web demo.
The logging portion should be achieved with an OPC->SQL datalogger. Powerful SQL databases are free, easy to install, and run well on regular PCs (Win XP, for example). Again, my recommendation is
FactorySQL. You might also contact
Matrikon or
Software Toolbox, both are good outfits. For a very small project, OPCEx or similar.
The scope that you're project might eventually get will dictate your best choice. If you're storing data for regulatory purposes and not using it much, a simple data logger will do fine. You would still have the ability for a technical user to connect over the network to view data and manually export date ranges to a .CSV file to use with Excel.
Inductive Automation's bread and butter is on growing into a distributed SCADA system.
FactoryPMI expands on FactorySQL by allowing you to build screens that display graphs, sortable tables, choose a date range to export to Excel, etc. Capabilities also include graphical representations of realtime/historical controls. Users pull up this data by clicking a link from a web page on your local network. That's a fixed cost approach that will scale with your plant. Other vendors approaches typically split the HMI portion from the Historian, but allow you to achieve similar results.
If your project will always be small (users on one computer), then cheaper OPC utilities would be appropriate. To answer your question.
1. Getting your Compact Logix on an Ethernet network should be a piece of cake.
2. Data will be easy to extract. OPC is the standard that makes this possible. Your "OPC Server" would be RSLinx (any version but Lite), Kepserver Ex,
Matrikon, etc.
3. Logging the data should be a simple drag and drop approach using an OPC to SQL data logger.
Hope that helps,
JeffKiper said:
Surferb what do you recommend to use?
I am doing a little research. We have a sheet that the operator has to go every 15min. or so and record the data. Then the supervisor loads the data into an excel sheet. The operator looks at a group of 30 + single loop controllers to record the data. I am building a control sytem to replace the controllers with a CompactLogix that will be on a network. Easy to extract data from I hope. I THINK/HOPE that we should be able use data logging to simplify this task.