News...
December 30, 2008
Ok, so I guess 'White is the new Black'. So much for a pallette change. Something about high contrast and 'bright pretty lights' that tickle the fancy.
Anyway, bogged down with work something fierce, some site cleanup has been in order as well as minor server maintenance (log rolling, var file cleanup, etc...) That aside, a few very interesting things have been going on in the world of SpinelliCreations!
The Cereal-2-Doc project has been completed for a while now; we stopped at rc-1, revision d - and have made numerous spins off of that. The decision to not go any further was based on the limited use of Loma Checkweighers in industry, and very limited response to the project. It was thought better just to 'finish it off' so that it accomplished all of the objectives for my employer's specific purpose, and not necessarily tailor it any further for 'universal usage'.
The mod_OpenOPC project fell out of the sky! Barry B., another techie recluse and cross-platform junkie, came up with OpenOPC - a cross-platform gateway and client that allows any operating system to 'talk' to a Windows hosted OPC Server (such as RSLinx, KepWare, INGear, etc. etc...). However, Barry's program was less of a program and more of a Python module, or Library (as he call it). In reality, it does exactly what you want it to do, but you're relegated to very specific command line statements within the Python shell. Rather, mod_OpenOPC uses the latest 1.1.6 build of OpenOPC and then expands upon it, creating a full featured command line front-end (yes, we love these things). From mod_OpenOPC, the user can run automated service level OPC routines that will auto-log the desired data to neatly organized MySQL database tables. From there... yes, there is more...
S.E.E.R. was born. Out of sheer frustration with overpriced, underpowered, unsupported (if my tech support doesn't come from someone who actually wrote the software or took part in debugging it, then I don't consider it actual support, because it means they likely know less about it than I do -- and I just bought the damn thing), I spent a weekend building a front-end of mod_OpenOPC -- not a control front end, but a 'data viewer' and 'machine control' front end. Yes, S.E.E.R. allows the user to pull the data that mod_OpenOPC has captured and stored in tables for viewing as a cross-platform, http web-distributed, php server side driven (no more client machines being bogged down by poorly cobbled together Microsoft ASP pages and Javascript) multi-user HMI (human machine interface). But, just displaying data - that's great - but it's not enough. S.E.E.R. goes the extra mile and allows the user to adjust or enter data (text fields, drop downs, 'on'/'off' buttons) to the machines that it is monitoring. This means that S.E.E.R. can be deployed as a full machine control suite with mod_OpenOPC, as a replacement for GE Fanuc's iFix / Wonderware / and Rockwell Automation's Factory Talk Machine View. While high refresh rate continuous data streaming requires a sufficiently robust machine (likely a dedicated one if you seek to perform full machine control), this is really no different than the machine requirements of the other competetitive software. However, what sets S.E.E.R. apart is that you can also deploy it as a 'sentinel' to service plant-wide I/O functionality -- again, big goals require big hardware, so while you can do some modest tasks on a desktop PC, don't expect to 'have your plant at your fingertips' with your laptop running S.E.E.R.; get a server, get a big server. Hey, you can spend all that money that you would have paid for the competitor's products (4 to 10,000 USD, depending on license), and dump that into your extra server backbone, because S.E.E.R. and mod_OpenOPC are AGPL and GPL v3 licensed as open source software, protected by the GNU.
Updated: Dec. 30, 2008
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