Any experience with connecting SEL to Ignition

We are looking into switching vendors for our scada system and Ignition is high on our list. I am actually going through the intro course that is online just to get my feet wet. The DNP 3 section was very limited, and that is our protocol. How easy is it to download tags from inside an SEL device and have them imported into Ignition and have the tag names displayed in plain English as opposed to alphanumeric format that then needs to be translated so operators know what they are looking at?

If you're accessing them over DNP3 you don't get the "real" tag names used in your logic.

I don't know if there's a way to export that information and use it to rename all your Ignition tags easily or what. @msteele might have some advice? He's at least somebody my brain as associated with SEL RTAC devices :slight_smile:

1 Like

Thank you for your reply. Yeah that is one of our big questions, and we are trying to find another utility that uses ignition for elec distro but I haven't come across one yet.

So, while you're just getting started going through the Inductive University videos, you'll probably find that you won't even use the tag names that you get from the DNP3 driver at all. Typically, what you'd do is create a UDT for a specific device like a relay or power monitor, and inside that UDT, you'll essentially "map" your "pretty" tag name to the raw DNP3 tag name. This allows you to structure your UDT tags with folders, set up alarming, trending, etc. at the template level (with parameters), then create parameterized instances of those UDTs that will dynamically connect to the appropriate device and tags. (It hopefully makes more sense once you get to the OPC connections for UDTs videos on how to parameterize your UDT tags to a dynamic OPC Item path)

I haven't used DNP3 yet so I don't know what those tag names look like, but may be soon as we have some jobs we're expecting to get RFQs for that will be either SEL or GE power monitoring/relays and until I get that info, I don't know what we'll be getting into.

Thank you. I'm hoping to have a little offline enviro set up where I can play with ignition on some of our SEL products to see how that will look. I was just hoping to get some insight as to what the process would be before I started running head first into walls.

You're definitely in the right spot. The videos are a great way to see how things work, and if you have any questions the forums are very active with lots of us users and Inductive staff here to help.

If you're familiar with Docker at all, you can run Ignition inside docker for testing on servers, or even your own PC (I run multiple instances inside docker on my laptop for testing for various clients). Ignition is lightweight enough also to install directly on your PC/laptop for testing and the 2-hour unlimited reset trial allows you to test all the features and do development without paying a dime.