I am new to Ignition and wanted to know what the best work flow for developing and deploying it on our product would be.
So currently what I have done is I developed the screens and tested them at my desk using my laptop, a local DB, and a PLC that we have for testing. Now I need to deploy the screens to another computer with its own DB and PLC. What is the best way to do that?
This is a stock product that we offer so it will have to be done each time we sell one.
Perhaps something like the following. Keep in mind that I don’t know anything about your product.
The following assumes that each product you sell does not have access to your own server with Ignition installed and so therefore each product needs its own installation of Ignition. Is this correct?
Develop your Ignition product on your own computer (which we can call the master computer).
Make an Ignition Gateway backup of your Ignition on your master computer. Make a database backup.
Install the DB for each product on a computer and restore the database. For each of your products install Ignition and restore the gateway backup. Then test it to make sure it works.
So after I deploy the back up on the product I would then make any IP address changes that might be required for the new PLC?
I used to do a similar thing.
I had a USB stick of the most current backup. Install that to the machine and connect it to your local wifi.
Install your database program from the USB stick too. I used mysql, make sure you install it with the same password credentials as they are stored in the gateway backup.
Using your laptop with the database on, access the same network and transfer the database over, you will need to know the IP address of the machine.
If all your machines access the PLC with the same IP address, then no need to change it. Just make sure the backup has that IP address set for the devices.
The company we used to buy our panel pc’s from were willing to do all of this for us. I never bothered and done it myself.
also, using the ialabs scripting module, you can change the ip address used for the plc’s on the fly, provided you are using Ignitions built in device drivers.