A simple Vision question that turned into a conversation on Pros of Vision & Perspective

I understand that, and I was just theorizing in a one off solution where a kiosk on a plant floor may need a serial barcode scanner. For other reasons, it hasn’t been terribly uncommon for us to turn an HMI/Kiosk into an edge gateway to gain specific functionality we couldn’t get with a perspective or vision client, so this doesn’t sound too far out there to me.

However I would say again, I wouldn’t be surprised if Workstation Edition can support devices like that, don’t know that for sure at all, but time will tell

I'll let you know when I get my hands on this "mostly theoretical" beast.

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I still haven't completely figured out how code and state in perspective flow. Maybe this would make more sense indeed, if the QT wrapper talks to the gateway and the perspective scripting is also run on the gateway.

The advantage of Electron is that it provides API bindings to the native system directly into the JS layer. This would help for custom React components having direct access to the system, though I guess when you use scripting, you don't get easy access to the JS layer, so that Electron api doesn't help much.

hah!

I’d be guessing as much as you if I had to imagine what a ‘post-vision’ design environment might look like. Web technologies are appealing for obvious reasons of ubiquity, but as it stands today, would be an impossible task to convince me to build a product like that on top of the node/npm ecosystem.

There are so many cool things happening in inter-operative software right now (containers, graal, web assembly, etc), will be really interesting to see how things mature. I suspect we’ll just have to evaluate the technologies available when the time comes to make a call and figure out the best path forward.

On the perspective/workstation side - you can probably expect us to follow a release model similar to the mobile app. First, make it available with some of the most obvious and basic functionality, and then implement features according to the demand and feedback we get.

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I’m extremely curious to see how it compares to vision in 3-5 years. It definitely opens another suite of doors for Perspective, because it’s almost like a hybrid of both platforms. I’m not saying it will ubiquitously replace Vision, but overtime I’m curious how each will individually grow in parallel

Separate note: How frequently is the mobile app updated? Does it get an update with each new patch version of Ignition, or does it have its own unique release cycle? Honestly I’ve never even thought about the fact that it’s technically it’s own platform

Probably should have been a little more specific in my choice of words. To answer your question - the mobile apps have their own release cadence. Not uncommon that we plan a release of them along with the release of an Ignition due to changes that impact interoperability of the two, but they aren’t strictly tied together.

That said, I didn’t mean that we’d release workstation editions at a different cadence than we do Ignition. That may happen if there’s a benefit to it, but at least initially I suspect it will release in concert with the perspective module.

I was more talking about the feature side of workstation. It will certainly open up a lot of possibilities to interact with the underlying OS, but I suspect it will take some development cycles to really figure out how to best make use of that in concert with Perspective projects.

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Would it be possible/common that the mobile apps get featured in updates separate from the main release cadence? For instance if tomorrow you guys added the ability to lock the app into a specific project (something that may be useful in some environments where you’re using an iPad in guided access more as a kiosk). Would we find that information out in the change logs, release email, or would we just need to pay attention to the app release notes as well independently? I know currently I read the nightly change logs here as they come out to keep up to date, but I’m not sure I've ever seen any app release info there?

Those are great questions Keith - it does seem that we have room to improve release communications in relation to the apps. I don’t have answers, but am going to bring this up to some stakeholders so we can close the gap there.

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c

was able to get to the raw serial data using the gateway serial module. Was unable get the client serial module to work on my scale app in perspective, but the Gateway serial Module works great.

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The client serial module is Vision only. Using the gateway serial module is equivalent to my #1 recommendation, several comments ago.

I haven’t tested this, but try changing your relative setting to anchored top left and right. Make sure the label is relative.