SCADA for SLC 505

[J.P.]

I need an all in one, cheap SCADA system that I can log production counts from an ethernet connection to excel continuosly.I need something that doesn't require being a "guru" to figure out how to set up. I hope someone can point me in the right direction.

 

[parky]

Depends on what you mean by cheap, generally there is no such thing as a cheap scada, however Beijers do one called Cezar, this is under £1,000 for a 250 or 500 tag system, it's easy to use & quite powerfull, data logging is easy to configure & scrips are easy if you know a little about basic.

It interfaces with most plc's as there are drivers for most although I have never connected Cezar to AB I have connected the HMI E series via ethernet (this was to patch a mitsi FX2N through to a 505 then upto RSVeiw32).
There used to be a demo on the beijers site that is fully functional only gives 30 mins design time & 5 mins runtime though

 

[John Soltesz]

If all you want is to transfer some of the PLC registers to Excel you can use RSLinx OEM and use the DDE setup. I know that will work. There may also be a KEPWare driver that could be cheaper but I am not sure about DDE, it may be OPC only. Excel won't do OPC without an add-in of some kind. I think there is a cheaper single device type RSLinx OEM. How about $800-12k? I don't remember what my last one cost.
I did a mock-up once using RSLinx OEM to Excel/DDE and could monitor most anything in the SLC, even discrete inputs. If you know enough about Excel you can do a poor man's MMI. Alarms, process values, bar graphs, and trend charts with the right programming. I think you might be able to write to the PLC, but I didn't get to try that as I had real work come up.

 

[surferb]

Software Toolbox should start paying me...

Check out the OPC Datahub from Software toolbox to log PLC data to Excel. You will need an OPC Server (RSLinx, Kepware, etc) for most viable solutions.

I wouldn't recommend trying to cook up a DDE->Excel datalogger unless your time isn't worth anything.

All that said, Microsoft Excel is an amazing tool, but it's not the right one for data logging. For that (in the MS world) you would use Access or SQL Server. It's all about storing your data in (SQL) databases not spreadsheets. Spreadsheets can be good tools to work on views of some of the data, but aren't meant for, or good at, dealing with lots of data.

If you expect your project to grow, particularly if you want to access the data remotely, view graphs, generate reports, query the data in any way, etc, you'll be moving more toward what the industry refers to as a Historian. For that you'll want to look into FactorySQL and FactoryPMI.

I got in a debate with another poster about this exact topic here. I'd recommend doing a search. There are lots of posts that address this exact question.