I have a device that I am trying to get connected to with the TCP driver. The device is currently able to be viewed from a website. How can I figure out the parameters to use the Ignition TCP driver?
All I have is the IP address and the port. How can I find the packet size, message delimiter, field count, field delimiter?
You need documentation or some other knowledge about the data format you can expect from the device.
This driver is meant to connect to simple things like barcode scanners and scales. The expectation is that the device will spit out data in some regular, parseable/splittable format, to anything that connects to it.
If that’s not the case then this driver may not be appropriate.
@Roger_Weidling we use our own buffered TCP driver to capture messages that arrive at nearly the same time. We don’t use any field delimiters etc. on the driver we just capture the raw string as an OPC value. So it may be possible to do what you need without setting any field values.
Then in scripting inside of the project we break the message apart to decode it and do what we need. As Kevin eluded to this is all based on the message spec provided by the equipment manufacturer.
Nick
Thanks for the replies. Support at the vendor has “no idea”. I am trying to find a way to capture that info and decipher. Maybe I am asking the wrong question. This is for an alarm system, the card has an IP address that allows me to go to a website and look at some alarm information. Should I be trying to use some other connection method?
Probably. Ask them if there is any other way to get the alarm info you're interested in besides the web page on the device.
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Hopefully they have a better way to access this data as @Kevin.Herron suggests. If the web page is the only way, you may be able to scrape the data you want from in scripting after retrieving it via system.net.httpGet.