We currently use Honewell DR4300 circular chart recorders for furnace temperature monitoring. I’d like to go paperless and be able to generate nice reports and figured I’d just use Ignition for this. However, I came across some dedicated products for this (links below).
Has anyone tried this before? What would be important is the ability to overlay or tag events for a batch load in/out. The products above allow the user to write directly on the screen and mark it that way. The end goal would be to be able to select from a list of open active work orders and mark that way, but the initial simplicity of these products for just recording information is appealing. It has the potential to cut down development time and offload the charting details to the instrument instead of building it. The tricky part would I’m sure be interfacing the two for the batch/work order IDs and also getting some kind of reporting out of it. The charting is pretty important in our world, as it’s a document that the customers get in many cases and is tied in with material certifications.
Does anyone have wisdom/experience feedback in regards to this?
In my experience dedicated devices like this are OK as far as they go, but you invariably end up running into their limitations, particularly when trying to share data from them. That’s when the much greater customisation potential of Ignition comes into its own. There’s no substitute to having your data easily accessible in a relational database.
I do like the ability to hand-annotate the chart though! For an alternative to this, have a look on the Ignition Marketplace at Automation Professionals’ new NoteChart module released only a few days ago which allows you to annotate Ignition’s built-in Classic Chart and Easy Chart components (see this post).
Matt
I think if you are already using ignition is probably better to get the data from the history database and plot it there, that way you can relate many different variables in the same chart while keeping your data in one place.
I’ve updated the announcement post to include a demo project that shows the NoteChart module capabilities in action. You may find it helps answer your question. Personally, I don’t specify anything for my customers that can’t live feed a database.
