**Critical**Can we enable/disable multiple devices at the same time on the gateway

Ignition
1

We have about 200 Horners that we would like to connect to on a daily basis to retrieve the data from them. We have logic to enable the device at a particular time every morning. We cannot keep all 200 devices enabled all day. this is a limitation and hence a requirement.

currently, we are doing this sequentially. one device is enabling itself in the gateway at a given time. it takes over 4 hrs to complete the entire process. it seems such a waste.
we would like to enable the 20 devices at a time and retrieve the data from these devices.
the device driver configured is a Modbus TCP.

i would like to know whether enabling & disabling multiple devices is recommended or is there is limitation in ignition that allows the user to make only limited number of gateway changes at a time.

2

How are you enabling/disabling the devices and what else does your script do?

Access to the internal database is ultimately single-threaded but it’s hard to imagine a reason why anything would take 4 hours.

3
  1. In my instance, i have hardcoded the wake up time for each device. the instance checks if it is time to enable the device. if that is true, then i am enabling the device in my code by running the set device enabled command in the a tag event script inside my instance . system.device.setDeviceEnabled. i set this back to 0 after retrieving the data there by disabling the device connection.
  2. we are sequentially enabling 1 device at a time. first device gets enabled at 8:30 am, gets connected to the Horner, retrieves the data and then disables the device connection. i was not sure if it is safe to enable multiple devices at the same time. so i allow 1 or 2 minute between each device connection. that’s why its takes us 4 hrs to retrieve all the data. it does not take 4 hrs to retrieve data from 1 PLC. i apologize for not wording it well.
4

In most Ignition setups all devices are enabled all the time, so unless you’re leaving out something weird about your setup then yes, it’s safe.

5

I would look at using an OPC server that supports scheduling like, autosol or kepware. You tell the OPC server what time to collect info from the device and it takes care of doing it for you.

6

What is a Horner ?!