awesome! we have a customer who needs this for a really fast data acquisition system
Hi, in Norway Ignition is really starting to gain momentum, a lot of companies has adopted to the software. Same applies for Beckhoff, especially in the aquaculture industry. A ignition ADS driver would really help to utilize these two systems.
You already can, because Beckhoff has either onboard OPC UA server or software OPC UA server for their PLCs.
Is there some use case not served by Beckhoff's OPC UA implementation that you can point to?
Of course OPC UA will do the job, but you basically need to throw more money at your setup because Beckhoff is charging you for Opc ua access on a runtime level.. Other than that, just the pure performance hit you are getting when turning on Opc ua forces you to choose a higher âperformance classâ of IPCs.
ADS is used natively in the Beckhoff systems and will give a better integration to scada, in my opinion. Ignition has Siemens and Omron native drivers, so why not ADS:)
Well, it's coming. But up until now "why not" has been because there is already OPC UA, and while a few people have made vague mentions of performance, not a single person has ever backed it up with hard numbers and hardware models.
I'm not doubting the claims, but these kinds of things help increase the priority.
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Embedded PCs series seems not supporting OPCUA, with limited CPU.
For them ADS is probably the best solution.
for compact industrial PC with powerfull CPU like intel Core i7, OPCUA is a better choice with possibility to reach 100K tags without issue, but harware and software cost of such PC/PLC are too expensive for some market or you have to group Ignition and PLC on the same harware, wich is not always a good practice.
IMHO ADS versus OPCUA for Beckhoff is like S7+ versus OPCUA for Siemens CPU.
OPCU is only suitable with powerfull CPU but not for entry level CPU, especially if too many tags are used.
As a side note, what is coming for Beckhoff PLC and seems important to me too, is the protocol to use for the support of the coming redundancy solutionâŚ
OPCUA server with a virtual @IP, transparent for the client ? ADS or OPCUA connection for each CPU @IP ? ADS with a virtual @IP ?
Q4 2025 ?
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Well ⌠at least for Siemens I could throw in some numbers ⌠admittedly most people I know that use Beckhoff use ADS and not OPC-UA. I have been told not too much has changed on the Siemens Side and I guess thatâs why everyone is so happy about the S7CommPlus driver in 8.3.
An S7 1500 at a customer was able to serve 200 tags every 2 seconds using OPC-UA. If they wenât above that the IO load was so high, that the PLC went to error mode. With the old S7Comm protocol, I was able to extract the 2600 datapoints in 200ms with increasing the CPU load by I think it was only 7%.
My main issue, that I have with OPC-UA, is that itâs a super heavy weight protocol and serving such a protocol, requires more of an application server on the PLC side.
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