I am very new to the concepts of OPCUA and how machine control works so please
bear with me.
What I am attempting to do is to integrate some custom production software
into machine control using OPCUA. My desired effect is to allow sending
values into various machines for setup purposes. In most cases our PLC’s
are Allen Bradley and would connect directly to the Ignition OPCUA server as
devices. In my testing this works just great. In at least one case though,
we have a Beckhoff controller that has it’s own OPCUA server.
What I would like to do is connect the Ignition server directly to the
Beckhoff OPCUA server… using the Ignition server as a proxy
for communication so that all software I build only has to be concerned
with connecting to Ignition for reading/writing machine tag data.
+-------------------+
| Custom Software |
| OPCUA Client |
| |
+----------+--------+
^ v
+-------+-----------+
| |
| Ignition Gateway |
| |
+----+------------+-+
^ v ^ v
+-----+-----+ +----+------+
| Beckhoff | | AB |
| / Kepware | | Logix |
| OPCUA | | |
+-----------+ +-----------+I have been able to connect Ignition to a Kepware server for testing and can
browse the tags provided by Kepware using the Quick Client. Is there a way
to make Ignition publish the Kepware tags when connecting to it as the OPCUA
server? If so how do you browse the Kepware tags from an external client like
UA Expert and later my custom software with OPC client functionality?
Thanks
Cory L