SCADA software has gotten out of control

The subject of this post is the first line of the introduction of a SCADA suite that we use. It’s called Ignition and created by Inductive Automation. It runs on Windows, Mac and Linux. 

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Ignition by Inductive Automation^TM is an industrial application server, used to create systems that cover the full spectrum between HMI, SCADA and MES. Its unique architecture enables rapid project development and deployment.

 

100% Web-Based

Ignition is web-based. Our server software is configured via your web browser. Our drag-and-drop designer and clients are launched from your web browser using our innovative web-launched technology. Tedious client installations are a thing of the past.

 

SQL Database Centric

Your data is always stored in an open, accessible format. Our SQL datalogger and tag historian feature are compatible with any modern SQL database. Ignition has native support out of the box for Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, Oracle, and PostgreSQL. Our SCADA and reporting features can pull data in from multiple databases simultaneously.

 

100% Cross Platform

Ignition is written in 100% Java, making it the first mature cross-platform HMI, SCADA, MES package available on the market. Top-to-bottom support for all major operating systems opens new dimensions of architecture flexibility. Companies are now free to use the system they want – not the system they’re constrained to by outdated technology.

 

Unlimited Potential

Access is important for efficiency. That is why we don’t limit it with software licensing costs. Buying client licenses or tags will no longer hold up your project. This allows you to put your effort toward adding more functionality into your system, while providing access to everyone who needs it.

Check out the video.

We would love to get a glimps of the software used in Honda’s robot ASIMO!

One of our colleague taped a Asimo live demonstration in Disney World Florida. We are very impressed with what Honda achieved.  You can just wonder on how soon  it could be possible to have a Asimo in every home. Imaging what it could do for the elderly and disabled people!
Asimo is short for Advanced Step in Innovative Mobility.
Although it is possibly also a reference to the famous science fiction author Isaac Asimov who is the father of the  Three Laws of Robotics:
1: A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2: A robot must obey any orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3: A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

This robot stands about 1 meter tall, it looks humanoid, and is capped by a spaceman helmet with a black visor. Most remarkable about the Asimo is not its appearance, but the way it moves. It lifts off with one foot, sways its hip to maintain its center of gravity, and through a controlled fall, arrested by its lifted foot, it advances towards a goal. In short, it walks like a human. When one imagines a robot moving, stiff movements are the result. One leg lifts, extends, lowers, pauses, followed by the other. Asimo has sensors to calculate its center of balance and velocity, and knows how to move just like humans do, with a casual stride. This is remarkable to see in action like when he climes the stair or runs like a human. Our colleague not just watched the robot but also the people watching the show and wasn’t surprised that some of the them showed misty eyes from emotion.
Wow, it’s like the Grand Canyon, nothing can prepare you for the actuel real  thing!

Thank you Honda  and please, please, please show us more!

Arduino mega and the LOL shield

I purchased the LOL shield because I need it for a simple demonstration. I’m going to use the Arduino mega 1280 to display the numbers 0 to 9 on the LOL shield. That is not difficult to do, but I am also going to use a remote control to send a number to the Mega. That number should be left out of the sequence 0-9 that is displayed by the LOL shield. The fun part of the demonstration is an inspection camera that is used to ‘detect’ the missing number. It sounded easy but the problem started with the combination Arduino Mega and LOL shield. The LOL shield works perfectly on the Arduino UNO but it doesn’t work on the Mega. I’m not the only one running into this problem. The video below shows the problem. (No, it’s not me in the video below below, it’s another Arduino user.)

I started looking at the problem and started to eliminate problems. I started of using the simple example that doesn’t use the CharliePlexing library. I replaced the digitalWrite funtions with analogWrite(pin, 0) and analogWrite(pin, 255). This already got be a bit further. Then Gerard, one of my coworkers told me to disable the clock feeding timer 2. This resulted in rewriting the setup() function:


void setup()
{
alloff();
// Disable PWM on 0-13. Block the clock signal to timer2
TCCR2A = _BV(COM2A0) | _BV(COM2B1) | _BV(WGM20);
TCCR2B = _BV(WGM22) | _BV(CS22);
OCR2A = 0;
OCR2B = 0;
}

I Also updated allof() since the original function only implements the ‘UNO’ way, I needed a few changes because to do it the Mega way::

void alloff() {
// http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=rtHw_R6eVL140KS9_G8GPkA&gid=0
// http://www.arduino.cc/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1266009870
// Arduino mega pin magging does not correspond with Arduino UNO
// Pin mapping.
DDRE = DDRE &~ B00111011;
DDRG = DDRG &~ B00100000;
DDRH = DDRH &~ B01111000;
DDRB = DDRB &~ B11110000;
}

These 2 changes allowed me to use digitalWrite() again. The result looks promissing. The next challange is to fix the CharliePlexing library. It doesn’t work with the Mega 1280. The fixes given above should be applied to the CharliePlexing library also. Also a few other fixes are needed since the ATMega1280 is treated as an ATMega328 in the CharliePlexing library and that is not correct. I’ll post my results here.

See ya.

Update 06-02-2011: I ran into a second issue. The LOL shield and the IR library are using the same timer. I need to assign another timer to the IR library

Automatic live web page slideshow

One day, Rob Valent (Managing Director ATS Benelux) came up with the idea to set up a display in our public lunch area that shows several websites or local announcements. The application had to meet the following requirements:

- A full-screen web browser application
- A configurable list of websites
- A configurable interval for changing the website
- The possibility to add custom pages for announcements.

I did not find anything I liked so I started to write an application based on  Nokia’s Qt toolkit (not to be confused with Apple’s QuickTime), which has a WebKit browser included. Qt is the toolkit that is used by most the KDE desktop environment in Linux. It is a cross-platform C++ toolkit/framework which has all kinds of data structures, useful utility classes and an easy way for creating GUI applications. WebKit is the browser engine used by browsers like Google Chrome and Apple’s Safari.

The complete Qt SDK for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux can be downloaded free of charge from http://qt.nokia.com . For this project I have used the LGPL version, but there is also a commercial version available. More info about Qt, manuals for Qt Creator and Qt tutorials can be found at the Qt website.

The sourcecode I created can be downloaded here.

To create the GUI, I have used the Qt Creator IDE included with the Qt SDK. Qt Creator has a GUI designer a code editor and an interface to the build tools and the debugger, which is gcc/g++ on Linux and Mac OS X, MinGW on Windows.

I’ve used the QWebView widget, which essentially is the WebKit browser, as the main widget in the application and a QMenuBar, because a menu bar is the easiest way to access the settings dialog and the shut down button of the application.

For each GUI screen created with the GUI designer, a C++ class is created. In the constructor of the MainWindow class, I read the size of the screen and set the size of the QWebView widget accordingly. This is also where the signals and slots of the different objects are connected. Signals are emitted when a specific event occurs to notify other objects that this event occurred. A slot is a special function in a class, to which a signal can be connected. If that signal occurs, the connected slots are executed. Since slots are functions, they can also be called as a regular function from other functions or classes.

In the MainWindow class, there is a QTimer, a QList of QUrl objects and a QSettings object. The function of the QTimer, QList and QUrl are considered obvious. The QSettings object is more interesting. This is a platform-independent way of storing persistent settings for an application. That’s not very special in itself because that can also be done using an INI file or something similar, but the interesting part is that it does this in the way that is native to the platform it is running on. On Windows it uses the registry, on Linux a file in the home directory and on Mac OS X it uses a property list.
The keyPressEvent function is implemented to make the hiding and unhiding of the menu bar possible. It is called by Qt when a key is pressed, so appropriate action can be taken when the escape or tilde key is pressed. The tilde (~) key is added to make management from an iPhone or Android device possible.

In the Settings dialog, nothing special happens. When the OK button is clicked, the settings are written to the QSettings object and a signal is emitted that the settings have changed. This signal is connected to the MainWindow, so that the settings are applied immediately, by reading them back from the QSettings object in the MainWindow class.

To deploy the software on a Linux or Mac OS X system, there are no prerequisites apart from installing the Qt runtime libraries QtCore, QtGui and QtWebKit using the package manager of choice, i.e. apt-get, MacPorts etc.
To deploy the software on a Windows system, the Qt runtime libraries and the compiler-specific libraries need to be included in the distribution package. The complete list of DLL files required is found in the next screenshot. To show Flash animations, it’s required to install Adobe’s Flash Player for Firefox and Safari.

A Windows distribution package is included with this post. The source is also included, so you can play around with it. Just open the Ticker.pro file using Qt Creator and you can get started.

We have the browser running on a Windows system now. The next challenges are to get it running properly on a Linux based live USB stick or even Freddy’s IGEPv2 board.

Source code can be downloaded here.

Openbricks, an industrial grade Embedded Linux Framework

You really might want to take a look at http://www.openbricks.org If you are in the process of cooking your own linux distro for an ARM platform like the IGEPv2. I am using it to get Geexbox up and running on one of my IGEPv2 boards and Romke is in the process of getting another application up and running with OpenBricks.

Visit http://www.openbricks.org/the-5mn-overview for more information.

Looking at the Arduino for use in the Industrial Automation

A few weeks ago, I purchased an DFRobot mega (Arduino mega 1280 clone) and an LCD display from Freeduino.eu, a few days later I also bought an ethernet shield (mega compatible) and a few components. This purchase also resulted in an additional free of charge Arduino Uno. I bought the Arduino to find out if it is usable in industrial automation projects. My current setup (see image) is a learning environment able to measure temperature and light intensity and it controls an RGB LED. The ethernet shield helps me sharing the measurements using a webserver. The mega clone (positioned under the LCD) is just running the LCD4Bit_mod demo application.

The Arduino platform is not expensive, the programming environment is for free and you only need 27,50 euro for an Arduino Uno, a USB A->B cable and an LED. Programming the Arduino is easy, just download the latest programming environment from http://arduino.cc/en/Main/Software and unpack the archive. After starting the programming application, just go to ‘examples‘ under the ‘file‘ menu and you can get started with your first sketch (that’s how they call an Arduino source file.) That’s exactly how I started.

The setup shown above will be split soon, the Uno and the ethernet shield will monitor my energy, gas and water consumption at home and the mega will be used by a few co-workers to see if it is usable for one of their projects. They need to count pulses and set an output accordingly. This should be a simple task for the Arduino  and the information at http://www.arduino.cc/en/Reference/AttachInterrupt should provide a good starting point. Bear in mind that when the ISR runs, it blocks all other processing. I will ask my co-workers to share their experiences on atstechlab. Before I can start my energy monitoring project, I need to write a sketch that transforms the Arduino Uno and Ethernet shield into a small TCP/IP IO controller with RFID reading capabilities.

I  think it is not a shame to use the Arduino in industrial automation projects. It’s small, cost effective and easy to program, it’s not harder than writing software for a PLC. It’s not all good news, the Arduino works with 5V signal levels and industrial projects mainly require 24V. Another disadvantage is that if you want to communicate on a CAN network,  you need to design your own CAN bus interface.

Finally, there are a few URL’s thatI would like to share with you, these offer more information about the Arduino:

• http://www.maartenlamers.com/ThisIsWiring/
• http://www.ladyada.net/learn/arduino/starterpack.html
• http://www.arduino.cc
• http://freeduino.eu (for people in the Netherlands)
• http://www.arduino.nu/ (dutch)

Gauge widget available at Google Code

A few months ago, I wrote an Android gauge widget based on the vintage thermometer written by MindTheRobot. I also updated the Vintage Thermometer in the process. I received a lot of positive feedback on the gauge and a number of people also asked me to share the code. It took some time but as of today, the gauge is available at Google Code. Get your copy from http://widgets4androidhmi.googlecode.com.

The project uses Mercurial and I choose the BSD license since that seems to be the most flexible one.

I do have one request though… contribute to the project if you find the gauge useful. I am looking for other than gauge widgets to complete the set. Leave a comment if you want to contribute.

QNX Neutrino, the new BlackBerry OS, what’s next?

The QNX Neutrino powered BlackBerry PlayBook was announced yesterday and today, a VP at RIM said that QNX Neutrino will power more BlackBerry devices. It seems that RIM is making good use of their latest purchase

Today, the co-founder and CEO of QNX Software Systems, Dan Dodge, was interviewed by the BlackBerry developers blog. I think the interview is worthwhile reading since it highlights the basics of the QNX Neutrino RTOS. Check it out at: http://devblog.blackberry.com/2010/09/blackberry-tablet-os/.

So, QNX runs on a wide variety of devices, will it power your future device?

QNX Neutrino powers a tablet PC

A few months ago, there were rumors on the internet that QNX was to power the new BlackBerry tablet PC. This time, the rumor becomes the truth. RIM announced the QNX Neutrino powered BlackBerry PlayBook.

Most of us know that QNX Neutrino is a mission critical OS and that it is used in the networks/telecom, medical, automotive, defense/security and industrial automation markets. Now it is used to power a tablet PC.

Also check Paul N. Leroux’s post on the PlayBook on his blog, he tells more about the introduction of the tablet.

The following URL’s offer more information if you want to know more about QNX:

• http://www.qnx.com/company/announcements/blackberry_tablet_os.html
• http://www.qnx.com
• http://www.foundry27.com
• http://www.openqnx.com
• ATS Donates ISEE IGEPv2 BSP to community

Make things goodder

Last friday, I attended the ATS Inspect workshop at the ATS university day 2010.  We were asked to describe ATS Inspect and one of my co-workers from the UK came up with ‘make things goodder’. To be honest, it does tell what ATS Inspect does.

ATS Inspect is an optical inspection suite that helps customers to reduce costs that comes with rework or scrapping a product. It also helps customers to document all quality aspects of their product during the production process. All information is stored in a database and it can be processed and displayed using a wide variety of modules that plug into ATS Inspect. A overview of ATS Inspect is given in the picture below.

At this moment, inspection data is entered via a user interface on a computer or mobile device but ATS is investigating the integration of the powerful high resolution Cognex vision camera into ATS-Inspect for real time high volume automatic inspection. This means that a number of quality checks can be performed automatically without an operator being present. This will speed up the inspection process.  An example of such an process could be the inspection of glass or the inspection of printed circuit board.

A lot of manufacturers say that they do not need ATS Inspect because the know their quality but they cannot tell how much additional costs are involved to achieve that quality. My suggestion would be that they would start up a pilot project using our Starter kit.

We will write more on ATS Inspect during the next couple of months. Our product development team is going to help us with it to give you more information on ATS Inspect. Please visit our ATS Inspect website if you are to impatient to wait for the next post. If you have questions or a suggestion for the next post, don’t hesitate and leave a comment.

PS: My boss, Rob Valent wrote a piece in dutch about optical inspection. Please visit this link to read the story.