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JPI Solutions is headed to ProveIt! Conference 2026 this year. This time with a booth! The team is excited to continue our support of the conference and the Industry 4.0 community. We are looking forward to engaging and connecting with industry colleagues and customers at the conference. ProveIt! is a different industry conference. Vendors, integrators, sponsors have to PROVE their solutions solve a problem that customers actually have and provide transparency on the solution

The Problem In natural gas production and processing facilities, operators routinely lose 5-15 minutes per trip walking between standalone compressor control panels and central plant control systems. During compressor startups, process upsets, or troubleshooting scenarios, operators may make dozens of these trips per shift which translates into hours of lost productivity, delayed responses to alarms, and increased safety exposure in extreme weather, trip hazards, or hazardous

Originally posted to du5tin.com on August 20, 2020. The DLOG block on a Telepace based SCADAPack is a super useful function. However, it can sometimes fail. Monitoring the status code will allow you to see what the DLOG block is doing and suggest possible solutions to the problem. Code Description Solution 10 The configuration is valid and data can be logged. All fine. Log is working. 11 A different configuration already exists for the log. Delete logs (remove and add "power

Originally posted to du5tin.com on August 13, 2020. Backing up a SCADA software database can be a bit of a chore. Manual copying files and folders to get a backup is a common place task and sometimes comes with risk that the software database will be corrupted! ClearSCADA includes a handy little backup object that will make a backup for you with no risk of corruption. This object is super useful and helps conscientious developers make backups as they work. It can even be auto

Originally posted to du5tin.com on August 6, 2020. We went over how to get authenticated using PowerShell and OAuth 2.0 in a previous article . It might be required to do that first! In this scenario we are loading up SCADA data from CSV files on disk and then pushing the data to the remote API service. Here is the full code: # Load the CSV Files $rawData = import-csv "data.csv" # Setup all the info for the subsequent API requests $url = "http://api_url_here/api" # Build up

Originally posted to du5tin.com on July 30, 2020. PowerShell is a powerful scripting language and set of tools included with every major version of Windows in recent years. Microsoft is working hard to be competitive with Python and other scripting languages. We recently did a project that required us to export a couple CSV files to disk and then transmit them to an API on the web. The API was a Swagger designed API that uses OAth2.0 for authentication. OAuth2.0 provides seve

Originally posted to du5tin.com on June 2, 2019. 2025 Note: This applies to 300 series or older SCADAPacks only. The new x70 SCADAPacks do not have these memory issues. We work with SCADAPack PLCs a lot in our line of work. They are pretty flexible devices. However, what many people do not know is that they have a relatively old OS and do not have great memory management. Here are my tips for properly setting up a SCADAPack. Some explanation as to why towards the end. TL;DR

Originally posted to du5tin.com on November 18, 2018. ClearSCADA Mobile is a useful add-on to ClearSCADA. It can consolidate data from several systems and provide it to remote users in their handheld or tablet devices. Because it is not easy here are some instructions on how to set it up!Disclaimer: I am putting this together so I can remember how to do this myself. Each time I do a CS Mobile install it takes a couple hours to hammer everything out. There are three parts to C

Originally posted to du5tin.com on November 14, 2018. When ClearSCADA 2017 was released it came with a great new feature, native in-app support for mapping and Geo-location. It is a really neat feature and if you can input locations for all your assets you can do some really interesting workflows. ViewX, WebX and CS Mobile can all publish user location information to the ClearSCADA server so you can put your operator locations together with your asset locations. I decided to

Originally posted to du5tin.com on January 14, 2018. Rockwell Software's RSLinx is the communication hub for their RSLogix and FactoryTalk programming suites. It allows users to connect to Allen Bradley PLCs and PACs as well as Panelview Plus HMIs and other equipment that speaks Ethernet IP, DF1 or DH+ (and their variants). Typically it is used solely with Rockwell and Allen Bradley products. However, it can also be used as an OPC server for various OPC clients, such as Clear

Originally posted to du5tin.com on November 7, 2017. I had found this forum post a long time ago and then lost it for a time because I forgot which key words to search for. I am posting this up on the blog so it can be easier to find, wish it was in the help file somewhere. Maybe it is... they have added a LOT in the help file in the CS2017 release. In CS2017 R1 and newer you can disable the creation of the Default mimic inside a new group. This is SUPER handy for those of us

Originally posted to du5tin.com on November 1, 2017. I was involved in a meeting recently and it was really apparent the business systems they had designed were done so in reflection of how their business was organized and how they wanted to use the data, not necessarily how their business apps were intended to be used. One of the participants mentioned to me afterwards that it was a perfect example of Conway's Law in action. I had never heard of Conway's law before so I did

Originally posted to du5tin.com on September 21, 2017. I have been working on a new project for a client and the topic of fonts came up today. I thought it would be interesting to find some facts on different fonts, what they are used for and where they came from. Created in the 1990's by Matthew Carter, Tahoma was first distributed with Windows 95. Tahoma was also the standard Windows font for Windows 2000, XP and Server 2003 replacing MS Sans Serif. Made by the same guy aro

Originally posted to du5tin.com on September 14, 2017. Little known fact: SCADAPacks can act as a Modbus Store and Forward hub when configured properly. Lesser known fact: SCADAPacks will also Store and Forward Enron Modbus, ROC Protocol, or basically any communications protocol where the first byte of the message is the address, has messages less than 240 bytes and uses Modbus CRC for checking message integrity. Even lesser known fact: Store and Forward will play nice and wo

Originally posted to du5tin.com on September 13, 2017. This has been puzzling me for a while... how do you set the WebX homepage? It is useful to put the user on a landing page other than the usual WebX logo page. I know I had done this in the past for other clients, but had since forgotten. Well no longer! To set the default page when you open WebX (such as using http://localhost/ ) you have to set the Default View on the root server object. Open up ViewX on the server. Then

Originally posted to du5tin.com on September 13, 2017. I have been exposed to Kepware a lot more in recent weeks. It is a full featured driver suite, not just for PLC communications anymore! This week in particular I have been tasked with creating over 1200 devices in a single Kepware instance. Good news! They have a REST API that can be enabled and served up by the local Kepware instance. You can find more information here:  https://www.kepware.com/en-us/support/resource-lib

Originally posted to du5tin.com on August 25, 2017. This month has been a great learning month. I was able to build and complete a small water SCADA system here in Canada (thanks GlobalFlow for the opportunity!) and we made the communications work using DNP3. So this system is built with SCADAPacks talking over a serial radio. Conveniently the master radio is at the same location as the primary reservoir which is providing the water level for our system start/stop commands. I

Originally posted to du5tin.com on August 4, 2017. The Red Lion DSP is a great little unit. It has mostly the same internals as their G3 HMI line but without the display. This makes it useful as a protocol conversion box, a data collector or a simple web based remote monitoring unit using the built-in web server. BUT it has its quirks; it doesn't have a lot of horsepower so if you are doing a lot of web server functionality you might have trouble when you start hitting the CP

Originally posted to du5tin.com on July 28, 2017. I was asked recently to build a meter template for ClearSCADA for Prosoft's new, enhanced E-AFC card. It is a 16 run flow computer module for Allen Bradley PLCs and it comes with Ethernet for simple connections. As I started testing things I immediately ran into a wall. It did not matter which platform I tried to poll the card with, I kept getting back an "Illegal Command" response from the card. So I called tech support, who

Originally posted to du5tin.com on July 18, 2017. The past few weeks have been incredibly busy. I cannot describe it. But I decided to make some time to try out something non-standard that might save clients some money on their transmitter costs. First off I need to give a shout out to Simark Controls  for lending me this new 4102 transmitter so I could do this testing. The Problem Traditionally if you are a Floboss customer you would be using their MVS 205 or a Rosemount 309