Like many end-users, our plant has continued to find ways in making Ignition more helpful to us since our implementation in 2015. One of the newest quests is to do a better job of monitoring process equipment health across a spread-out assortment of conveyors, pumps and dust collection equipment (among other items). We’ve done the ‘easy’ stuff at control panels (current and voltage) but need data on physical conditions like temperature and vibration at the machinery.
As new equipment has been added in the last several years we’ve included suites of sensors, but older legacy equipment also needs careful monitoring. Running analog sensor cabling around such a large building is expensive and cumbersome, takes too long to implement, and often results in limited or no data collection that would be helpful in predictive maintenance.
I’ve looked at Flex IO, tried the Banner wireless, considered OPTO 22 and the many other remote options, but can’t seem to find a product with reasonable cost-per-point for one to four 4-20 MA signals.
Does anyone have recommendations for devices that provide low cost/low density 4-20 MA signal acquisition through Ignition via (some) Ethernet transport? Wireless would be a plus (-;,
Take a look at Monnit. They have dozens of wireless sensors including temperature, vibration, and more. You can get an ethernet gateway from them, which can use Modbus TCP. Use the Modbus tcp to connect to ignition for data capture. I have not used them yet, but I plan on buying a small setup to try out.
We use Digi Connect+ Sensor cellular devices, They have 4 analog inputs and post their data to the cloud.We set them to collect a value every fifteen minutes and kick on the cellular connection once an hour and upload the four values. Using this slow rate the battery will last over a year. I’ve written a script to fetch that cloud data using httpget’s, parsing the JSON response and stuffing it all in the tag history db that i’d be glad to share if anyone’s interested.
yes please. I have been interested in finding a product like this. Where are you storing the data in the cloud? Is it some subscription service that Digi provides?
Digi stores the stuff in their proprietary cloud… we have our own Azure account with data storage, SQL servers and even our Ignition server is running on a Azure VM. So that’s why I had to write a script to dump the data from the Digi cloud service, parse it a bit and then add it to the Ignition historian.
anyways,… here’s their cloud site…
Hi, I am using wireless vibration sensor which also supports DIGI protocol to work flexibly with many high tech machinery’s and moreover the company is providing customize IOT solution for the data analytics
We have used various sensors from here with great success. We have used them with ethernet - ethernet wirless bridge(transmitting about 3500’). They do make an ethernet plug in that you probably could program to send data to the CLOUD and then retrieve.
Talk to their engineers they will listen and are very helpful.
