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Oh, ok, the test and operations case makes sense. As for your questions: 1. It's basic networking tasks such as running a network drop, assigning IPs, making sure the PLCs are on the right subnet, etc. In many cases the PLCs aren't on a network at all and the IT team doesn't really know how to work with the PLCs and the OT team doesn't really know how to work with networks. Sometimes it's been easier to just add external sensors and go over a cellular network and skip the PLC altogether. 2. We use one of Ignition's modules to interface with the control systems directly. They have drivers for Allen-Bradley, Siemens S7, Omron, Modbus, and a few others. The downside is Ignition doesn't have an API, so we have to configure things using a GUI. Beyond Ignition, the other big provider of drivers is Kepware - they probably have a driver for everything, but again, they aren't really set up for use by developers trying to deploy to a Linux box. If the customer has an OPC-UA server set up, we can connect to that using an open source library. 3. What we've learned is that many customers rely on third parties (e.g. the machine manufacturer or a system integrator) to configure their system, so when it comes to extracting the data they want, you're kind of on your own. We're not industrial system experts, so this creates a unique challenge. Larger and more sophisticated customers will have a much deeper understanding of their systems, but these folks are usually going to be using something like Ignition and will already have the dashboards and reports so it's more a matter of integrating with Ignition. |