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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

Originally posted to du5tin.com on June 28, 2017. This is slowly coming... the need to secure our SCADA web clients. What follows are some configuration tricks for getting WebX secure and also enabling the 'new' WebX to talk properly to 'original' WebX for the purposes of client ease of use (mostly to let them have full Mimics and Maps at the same time). So in your server configuration, this is pretty easy and straightforward. Just open up the server configuration from your s

Originally posted to du5tin.com on June 18, 2017. So before the weekend I posted and put up screenshots detailing how to get DNP3 configured on SCADAPack to report up to a ClearSCADA SCADA host server. What follows is the matching ClearSCADA configuration to complete the loop. These screenshots were taken with the latest ClearSCADA 2017, but should also work fine in older (back to 2010) versions of ClearSCADA. ClearSCADA DNP3 Config The biggest thing here is you need to ensur

Originally posted to du5tin.com on June 16, 2017. Its been a good month. I recently did some ClearSCADA training and apparently I might be one of a select few who has used the DNP3 features on SCADAPack in Western Canada. If you have also used DNP3 for your SCADA project, feel free to drop me a line, correct any non-sense, or otherwise comment below. :) Some terminology to get out of the way... Master - This is a SCADA host, data concentrator, or DNP3 routing device. It cou

Originally posted to du5tin.com on May 16, 2017. I just spent the last two days participating in an IoT and Data Analytics Hand-on-Lab at Microsoft Canada in Calgary. It was awesome to see what they are doing with their cloud product offering and how it can be used to enable business intelligence and possibility for new applications. Here is a screenshot of a PowerBI dashboard showing probability of being delayed due to weather at US airports (decent working example!). Out of

Originally posted to du5tin.com on May 1, 2017. In measurement knowing how your sensors are configured is extremely important. In the case of static pressure measurement, you need to know if you are measuring the absolute pressure in the meter run or the gauge pressure of the meter run. When you are installing and configuring new meters knowing which to choose is imperative. Some terminology to get out of the way first. Look some of this information up online. Some great arti

Originally posted to du5tin.com on April 21, 2017 Data is driving a lot of business decisions these days. In Oil and Gas communication technology has caught up to the point where high resolution data is available. This enables a host of remote analysis and troubleshooting opportunities for engineers and operators. However, high resolution data is not available unless it is configured in the RTU systems. Field techs need to know how to do this basic configuration task. Here a

Originally posted to du5tin.com on April 17, 2017 This is continuation of the series of articles I have written about git and using it for industrial automation projects. Every automation shop eventually gets to a point where they need some sort of central library of code or central project file store. Eventually you need a way to share files, share projects, or archive and backup important code so it does not get lost. Many companies work with a shared network drive, some ar

Originally posted to du5tin.com on April 7, 2017. The industrial automation world is just buzzing with internet of things (IoT) news and industrial internet of things (IIoT). SCADA software, polling drivers, field Ethernet to serial gateways and just about everyone else is taking advantage of the new buzzwords. One of the new primary protocols for IIoT devices is MQTT. Last month I attended the Well Site Automation conference in Houston where they talked much about the promis

Originally posted to du5tin.com on April 3, 2017. ClearSCADA was one of the first SCADA platforms to have a fairly complete and stable web based thin client. It has stayed the same through the years and is lagging behind a bit with lack of full graphics support on HTML5, but it is consistent and works well in a Windows environment. One of the most common complaints I have heard about WebX is how it limits the amount of space available on screen by including a fairly thick hea

Originally posted to du5tin.com on March 27, 2017. In an earlier article I explained the basics of git and how to use GitKraken , one of the various graphical interfaces of git. Now we are going to take this a couple steps further and show you how to use branches in git with RTU/PLC programming. Branches are an important function of any version control system. They allow the programmer to develop multiple versions of an application independently of each other while retaini

Originally posted at du5tin.com on March 20, 2017. Any developer's toolkit is going to involve a decent amount of software. An automation programmer's toolkit is full of odd-ball, proprietary, weird dependency driven configuration software. Here are some quick tips my mentor shared with me regarding software installers when I started doing automation programming. When I first got my laptop, she sat me down and walked me through this process: Build a Software Folder on the C:

Time zones are a SCADA nightmare. Most RTUs store timestamps in local time without offset information—fine when systems were local, problematic now that corporate SCADA spans multiple time zones. The fix: standardize on UTC, configure time zone info for field equipment, and let the SCADA host be the time master. Better yet, lobby to abolish daylight savings time.

Industrial programmers typically version control with dated folders—but git offers a better way. Using GitKraken, you can track RTU and HMI project files with proper commits instead of file copies. Stage changes, commit at logical stopping points, and previous versions are stored automatically. No more dated file clutter.

A 2013 SCADA upgrade in Northeastern BC transformed a crawling system into near real-time monitoring. The original setup took 15-20 seconds per poll over serial radio. By switching to DNP3 with Ethernet radios, we achieved report-on-exception alarming so fast that host alerts appeared before the onsite programmer saw them locally.