Can someone explain to me what I am paying $1K for with Edge Panel?
How does the client connect to the workcenter’s PLC?
/c
Given that you have 80 posts, and very briefly looking over them, you seem to know something about Ignition, so I’m a little perplexed about your question. But that’s ok, I’ll try to answer it and if there’s some sort of misunderstanding, hopefully we’ll figure out what it was.
Long story short: Edge Panel offers more functionality to price benefit than any of our recent offerings. So, if you have a project that can be satisfied by the features of Edge Panel, it’s interesting to you. If you don’t, it’s something you can ignore and just stick to the main product.
Let me put it differently: Previously, the cheapest version of the Vision module was a 1 client license that we didn’t publicize much for around $1800. Edge Panel has the same 1 client (and one remote, as well). With Vision, you would have had to buy whatever drivers you needed to connect to the PLC- Edge includes the “foundation” drivers (AB, Modbus, Siemens). If you wanted to do alarming (just email), you would have had to add the alarm notification module for $1700. History- you would need either the SQL Bridge, or Tag Historian for $1500/$1800.
Those prices were all for unlimited tags, yes. But for people with limited applications- typically on the “Edge”, and often as local fallbacks, these prices were prohibitive. We took a cross section of that functionality, came up with what we considered reasonable limitations (well, not just us, I probably ran them by dozens of different integration firms over the last 2 years we’ve been thinking about this) so that we didn’t undercut the main product, and put what we thought was an attractive price on it. Voila!
“How does it connect to the PLC” - The same way Ignition always connects to the PLC, with the built in drivers or a 3rd party OPC server.
I hope that answer your question sufficiently. In some ways, Edge can simply be thought of as a licensing configuration of Ignition, though there are a few new features that make the whole package work (like the local historian system, and simplified email alarming that doesn’t use pipelines).
Regards,
Thanks for the explanation.
I am an IT guy so my knowledge is limited to some of the industrial aspects still.
/c
No problem. I probably came across mean, but I really was also trying to figure out if there was some aspect of the presentation of Edge that we need to refine. It turns out that it’s a really tricky game to introduce a derivative/complementary product. It can be a bit confusing, “is Edge required?”, “Does it replace Ignition?”, “Do I need [this part/that part]”?
The real goal is just to offer greater flexibility for licensing. Also, we didn’t have a very clear offering for embedded/oem applications, and this gives us a better place to start.
Regards,
You know, to me I thought that it was a local HMI replacement that our controls guys are using. But since it still needs Ignition then it is not a local HMI replacement… ?
Hi,
Ah, yeah, that’s another bit of confusion that we saw in the webinar questions as well- Edge is purely software, not hardware. So when we talk about “HMI applications”, we mean this running on some sort of industrial touch screen computer, so no, it’s not just a drop-in HMI system.
I know that leads to “oh, well that’s even worse!”, it’s important to note that people have been using Ignition clients on industrial touch screens since day 1 (funny enough, the first time I ever saw our software running in a plant was on one of these, in 2004), and the most important point: Edge Panel + Touchscreen is still dramatically cheaper than certain very popular HMI systems.
But yes, Edge- just software.
Regards,