Ignition and PlantPAx

[tdw]

Backstory: We have utilized FactoryTalk View and PlantPAx for the last 11 years but lately there has been an increased request for Ignition. For this reason, I was tasked with building an HMI in Ignition to go with our PlantPAx (4.10) based control. New to Ignition I went on a five-day online course and afterwards downloaded the Flintium library to get started. I found the Flintium library incomplete, so I added the content we were missing. The application is now up and running but I have run into this dreaded issue with the unsatisfyingly slow response time.

I have spent many hours searching on this topic and now believe to understand what the root cause is. This leads to the following questions:

1. It appears all posts on this matter are of older date. Is this because everyone else has abandoned the idea of running Ignition and PlantPAx together?
2. Is it actually possible to get an Ignition-PlantPAx solution to run satisfyingly even on big projects?

I have read a 3^rd party EthernetIP driver by Automation Professionals exists which should be a significant improvement over the native ditto driver. Questions:

3. Will this driver make my application run satisfyingly?
4. Are modifications to the PlantPAx add-on instructions a mandatory requirement (as I understand it from the manual on said driver)?

We are running the latest Ignition together with the PlantPAx library 4.10.

[JordanCClark]

A little light reading:

Ignition & Logix Best Practice Tips for better communications

Hi All, After a whole bunch of issues I have gone down the rabbit hole of what is wrong with our setup on site. I will preface this by saying I a relatively new to all of this.... so be gentle Based on much reading(such wow) I believe I have a list of things our site could take away for a better system. Some of them are easy to implement, whilst some of them need... significant work to realize. Especially the AOI approach in point 5 Before going too far a…

[pturmel]

@JordanCClark

light reading

Based on the OP's intelligent questions, I'd guess they found that topic.

@tdw

questions

1. Rockwell has moved on to PlantPax5, which they built into the firmware. And thereby made it unfixable. Running PlantPax5 with Ignition is a total clusterf&^% simply unwise.

2. It is possible with PlantPax4. I have a stress test for my driver ~ 300k tags, polling at ~2½ seconds.

3. You really need polling of no greater than one second, with no overload. (So operator writes don't get stuck in the request queue.)

4. Yes, mandatory.

[michael.flagler]

Yeah, the quickest fix I found was to export the programs as L5X and use your favorite text editor to do a search and replace for the external access to change none to read only (check L5X for proper naming and formatting of this). Once you import it back into Studio 5000 you should be fine. Make sure all your tags are on the same tag group (I recommend just using direct mode with your desired rate). This allows @pturmel's driver to be optimized and only read each AOI once rather than for different scan rates.