Kepserver Enterprise

[Greg Dake]

I'm trying to get OPC data from a Yokogawa DX230/P chart recorder into a PanelView Plus 1000. The 230/p driver DOES come with Kepserver Enterprise, but is not one of the selectable drivers which can be downloaded into the PV+. Does anyone know if Rockwell has plans to make the rest of the drivers, which Kepserver Enterprise contains, selectable for download into the PV+?

I can run the 230/p kepware driver in the quickclient and everything looks good, kind of a bummer I cannot DL it to the PV+. My only other option at this point is to use the "User Configurable Driver"...This means getting the protocol spec from Yokogawa to do this. To make it more involved, the recorder is 21CFR11 compliant, meaning I also have to authenticate with a UN/PW. This is accomplished with the already written Kepware driver, it just isn't an available one to DL in the PV+

I've talked with Kepware, and they indicated there's no way to look at the already created 230/P driver to get the protocol specs....My contact at Yokogawa is out for a week or two.

Any ideas?

TIA,

Greg

 

[LadderLogic]

I've encountered a similar problem with another HMI package that is using KEPServer as communications middleware, namely Parker CTC InteractX.

It comes with its own copy of KEPServer, however, the list of available drivers was limited, comparing to KEPServerEx. Of course, the driver I needed was not available.

Parker told me the driver list was a result of a business deal between them and KEPWare. They were willing to add one more driver to their list provided we were willing to pay extra for that. We ended up using a different HMI software (for a variety of reasons, not only this one).

The only place that may resolve your problem would be Rockwell Automation. Talk to them and see if they will be willing to oblige (although I doubt it).

Otherwise you are out of luck.

 

[Greg Dake]

What a pain. Our experience with getting Rockwell to do anything custom is once you get to the "How much is it going to cost?" part of the discussion, their answer is "How much you got?". They are very much interested in selling you an enterprise level "solution", but not getting you what you really need at the moment for a particular problem. This is another reason I like to stick with our local AB/Rockwell distributor, they are typically more nuts and bolts hands on kinda people.

I don't blame RS, there is no money in helping individual issues, unless it applies to the masses. In thier mind you shouldn't HAVE to interface to anyone else's "thing" anyway, since you're supposed to be using an enterprise level "solution"...If you need help interfacing to something outside of this umbrella, they just realize they don't have their hooks far enough in you yet and they need to dig deeper.

I have sent a request into Rockwell to see what they'd be willing to do....Otherwise we might be writing our own driver via the UCON OPC driver.

Greg

 

[Greg Dake]

Client

If I could run the PV+ as an OPC client, I would be OK. I could feed the OPC data from the recorder to a differnt Kepserver which we have running, then browse that Kepserver with the PV+ as a client....Hmmm? I'm pretty sure this is not possible, I'm very green to the PV+ line, which I why I ask.


TIA,

Greg

 

[danw]

I'm not familiar enough with Rockwell to know what PV+ is, so I'm nor sure what topology you're working with, but I recently got an email ad from Kepware touting their LinkMaster package which addresses issues like

- OPC server to OPC server bridging,

- OPC server within server bridging (routing data between 2 PLCs connected to the same server)

- OPC server Gateway (a single OPC server 'umbrellas' multiple OPC servers

Maybe one of these fits generically to your issue? ?

Dan

 

[Greg Dake]

Update

RS is making this driver available for us (or we were the "X" customer to ask for it), in the next firmware release in September! Way to go RS!


Greg