Pepperl+Fuchs has some nice options for IO-link to OPC-UA.
I look forward to when IFM comes out with one
Neil, Iāll look back at this when I can. To be hone2st, we found the IFM solution to be quite wonky and abandoned implementation after POC. We did get it to workā¦it just wasnāt all that reliable. IIRC, we set up a OPC server and read the data from the module with the IOT port>
As I said, Iāll go back and look at my notes when I canā¦ but this just didnāt strike us as a mature solution.
Oh, they do have one
All fine and dandy but if IFM says I can bring in sensor info into Ignition from a master without a plc, then I should be able to do it.
You absolutely can, just the scripting they use in the demo udt doesnāt scale particularly well. Make your own script for it and itās much better. I actually wrote a module for it that also worked nicely, but itās still stuck in alpha.
To speak to this, when I worked with the UDTs in 2023, I identified a case where the regular polling of all 8 ports was overwhelming the IO-Link Master's Ethernet capacity and causing it to drop connection.
I worked out a couple of improvements (at the most basic, I reduced the polling to only 4 ports at a time rather than all 8), and IFM's support staff began working on some more performant UDTs for me to test. However, it doesn't look as though those UDTs ever got pushed out.
All told, I agree, the solution could / should be improved. Rolling your own seems to be the best option.
You should be using the bulk requests feature with this unit. the UDTs are poor for this as they are individual and do not optimise.
Agreed.
The UDT that IFM support began developing and shared with me was a retool that polled all 4/8 IO-Link ports and then distributed the data to each device UDT, rather than running 8 individual UDT poll scripts. It was incomplete, but an improvement over what had been running.
Even still, I tend not to use the implementation.