I am working with a factory that has Ignition SCADA. They are buying a piece of standalone processing equipment with its own HMI that they will later want to connect to their SCADA for centralised data logging (and possibly in the short-term they might want to connect the equipment to a separate data logger). The equipment supplier is asking what BUS system they should supply with their equipment - Profinet, Profibus, etc? What BUS systems will be compatible with Ignition SCADA?
Thanks in advance. Apologies if this is a bit vague. Any general advice would be much appreciated.
Profibus and Profinet sound like you are dealing with a Siemens plc. Generally speaking, the internal communication bus of the equiqment is independent from a SCADA connection.
Profinet is a fieldbus protocol that uses standard ethernet cabling and equiqment. Every modern siemens plc has a Profinet / Ethernet port. This port can be used to connect the plc to a Scada like Ignition.
But if a Profinet fieldbus is connected to that port, it should not be connected directly to your companies ethernet. At least a firewall is necessary to protect the profinet from incoming network spam. There are also security risks, but that is another subject.
So, if the Profinet port of the plc is already used as a fieldbus port, it is the best and safest solution to add an additional ethernet communication card to the plc and connect Ignition to that card. There are also processors with a second ethernet conection on board.
Ignition offers a driver for Siemens plcs, but that driver supports only an outdated legacy protocol. If the equiqment manufactureres meets Siemens programming guidelines, you will not be able to use that driver with a new equiqment.
An alternative option is a third party OPC-UA server or a processor with an on-board OPC-UA server. The connection from this on-board server should of course be physically seperated from a possible profinet fieldbus.
Sorry if this is too much information, but there is no simple answer to your question.
Indeed. Ignition has no native driver for any "bus" protocol except for Modbus RTU & TCP. It has various drivers for common PLC brands, but for connection to the PLC specifically, not for generic connections to that brand's I/O bus.
Ignition does have support via third parties for MQTT and Ethernet/IP.
It also depends upon what kind of equipment it is! When you say its a factory, is it robotic equipment or a manufacturing machine and how does it connect to other equipment and their HMI (thru profibus or profinet etc)? Whether its OPC or MTC compatible etc. Without knowing these details only general comments can be given.