Hello! I have access to ignition through my work, and I’ve been given a project but I don’t know whether Ignition would be appropriate for it.
Scope of Project:
I need to create a system that will allow me to track battery and center ride ( don’t worry about not knowing what this is, not important) usage across my plant. There are no sensors or data acquisition devices involved with this project, all data would need to be manually inputted via google forms. The google forms would collect five pieces of data: date of battery change, time of battery change, which shift did the change, the vehicle number that the battery went into, and finally the battery’s number. I’d like to create a system where I can analyze the trends for the batteries and the vehicles.
For the Batteries
I want to count the number of times a battery appears in a 24 hour period, and if it shows up more than X number of times, automatically flag the date, time, and battery number. I should be able to choose which 24 hour period (which day) I’m looking at, so maybe a drop down menu for that?
For the Vehicles
I want to count the number of times a vehicle appears in a 7-day period. I should be able to select what week and what vehicle I’m looking at (i.e. Week 1, Vehicle B or Week 1, Vehicle C, etc.). I’d like to know what time specifically a vehicle appears as well and flag it if the difference in time between its first and second appearance is greater than Y hours.
The idea is that as a person enters data via google forms, the system will update with it. I have zero experience with Ignition, so that’s why I’m asking here if this project is even in the capabilities of Ignition. If any of that was confusing, please let me know and I’ll try to clarify.
Thanks!
It sounds like a reasonable project, but you’d generally use an Ignition form (Vision or Perspective), not an external form.
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If the project isnt to big and you already use google forms, you might aswell just use google excel and stuff, those can draw graphs/trends too.
I dont think it would be worth to make somethign in ignition if its just tables and graphs, cuz google excel would be way more powerful and easier for that.
You can also run scripts in google so yh, if you dont use an other database or plcs… google seems just fine
Thank you for the quick response! How user friendly are either of those two options? Intuitively it seems easier to integrate pre-existing Ignition software into the project rather than Google, but if google forms is going to be easier on the user I’d probably go with that one, even if it meant more set up work for me.
I was originally using google sheets, but the idea of automating the system (i.e. having google sheets know when to flag a battery/ truck, break down the data into 1 day and 1 week increments, the drop down menus, etc) with google sheets just didn’t seem practical.
To be honest though, I hadn’t looked into scripts to do it. I don’t have much programming experience (unless you count Matlab) but I do have some time on my hands to learn. Do you think that the learning curve for writing custom functions via scripts on google sheets would be less steep than the learning curve with using Ignition?
If you can code in matlab, you can code Ignition imo. Igniton uses python 2.7 (techincally jython) which I think is generally considered one of the easier languages to read and write. Designing a window in Ignition is dragging and dropping components onto a window - doesn’t get much easier than that (of course this has its own drawbacks, but once you learn how to use layouts they are minimal).
I don’t know what sort of functions you would write for google forms, but I making a form in Ignition is a pretty standard and easy task.
The only alternative I would say (and I don’t know if this is possible from Google Forms POV) is to buy the web dev module on Ignition and then you could have Google Forms post new data to Ignition. But personally I’d probably be against this as you now have two points of failure to look out for - Google Forms and Ignition - and I don’t know what benefits you would get from Google Forms that you couldn’t get from Ignition.
If you want to see what Ignition can do you should check out https://inductiveuniversity.com/
I think Perspective would be as easy on the user as any cloud solution. I think the key question is whether you care if this works when your plant has an internet outage. Or google has an outage (rare, but does happen).
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I’m going to look into whether google script editing could work, while also looking at Ignition as a solution. From the bit of feedback I’ve gotten so far, it seems like the project is in the scope of Ignition’s design. Using google would be nice but like you said about what scripts I’d write: I don’t know how I’d do it to automatically update the graphs when new data is added to the spreadsheet.
And I’ll look into the link you sent me, thanks!
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Google scripts arent that hard.
Escpecialy for just highlighting somethign or so.
And shouldnt those graphs update automatically when you add in other data? Or was a refresh script required i dont remember, havent used it in a while. But im pretty sure you will find examples of exactly those kinda scripts.
I think it will be easier in google, but if you go for ignition it might be nice to have if the company eventually adds in real sensors.