Custom Driver guided example

Hi world.
I am starting for the very first time with Ignition SDK. In order to achieve my first custom driver which communicates with a simple protocol with quite simple ascii datagrams, I would like to know if any one here or even IA has something like a guided howto/example. I’ve been reading a bit through the WeatherModule_Gateway and it’s not being quite straight forward at all for me to understand it properly. :frowning:

Tnx in advance.

The Modbus driver is also included in the SDK, which is a better example of a full-fledged driver.

SDK documentation and guides are always a work in progress and I hope to have more info on writing drivers soon. Is there anything in particular you’re getting hung up on?

Just wanted to chime in that the Modbus driver isn’t obvious. If you import the folder set into a workspace the ModbusV2 project is seemingly absent. To add it into my workspace I had to dig for it then manually add the libraries for Ignition.

Thanks for your answer Kevin, I guess you’re talking about the ModbusDriver-v2, isn’t it?

Currently we are in a very early stage so, at the moment, no actual hung up, just starting to know the common procedure to develop our own scalable “generic driver” for simple Ascii datagrams.

I realize you’re already going down the road of writing a custom driver, but I might suggest there are a couple of ways to do this faster with existing OPC-UA products.

omnidssi.com/

kepware.com/Products/products_UCON.asp

If you spend even a week writing and testing a custom driver, you’ll probably be money ahead using one of these platforms. The decision probably hinges on other factors like your volume of installations, supported operating systems, and driver complexity.

ummmh I see. Indeed we’re not yet developing but still evaluating which way to go on. So currently we are testing OPC Genie (Matrikon) which I guess is quite the same as the alternatives you showed me. So, if you know’em all, as budget is quite limited in our case, let me ask you something:
are these 3 alternatives similar in their capabilities? if so, your last one looks fine.