I’ve been teaching myself Ignition with much help from the forum both in directly asking questions and also looking at other people’s solutions. I am new to Python and scripting in general and this is where most of my problems arise. The user manual generally gets me most of the way to a solution but I find that it is more of a reference manual that a teaching manual.
If there were a learning guide that guided a user step by step through most of Ignition’s features, I would certainly use it. I am thinking along the lines of walking a user through building a sample Ignition project that would include database support and nearly all of Ignition’s features.
A student (like myself) could buy a MicroLogix 1100, get RSLogix 500 for free, get Ignition Panel Edition for free and get MySQL for free. A student could, with this minimal investment, have all of the tools necessary to get a start in this trade. Perhaps this would build some brand loyalty toward Ignition much like Allen Bradley is doing by providing RSLogix 500 for free that will program a ML1000/ML1100.
I know you guys have much more important stuff to do than developing a learning guide but I’d sure like to have one.
Thanks
That’s definitely a good idea, and something that comes up from time to time. We would like our user manual to be usable to go from beginner to proficient, but there’s undoubtedly room for more goal-driven materials as well.
In the upcoming year the support division is going to be doing a lot of work to help people get up and running with the software, so stay tuned.
Regards,
I would like to add that I too am trying to learn Ignition and recently found that there is a large gap in the Ignition manual when it comes to Reporting. After 3 months or more I only discovered you can right click a report and save as PDF whilst browsing through many many many Q&A’s on this forum. This then led to the discovery of getBytes etc that is only mentioned in the old FPMI manual I also dug up. There certainly needs to be hundreds more step by step methods - Reports that auto generate and save to a file is just one example I have been working on that that has taken the best part of a week to fathom items like global scripts, timer scripts that access OPC tags that run getdate() queries that then goes on to run scripts with getbytes, writefile… etc,etc. all of this took a mssive amount of experimenting just to achieve what probably everyone is doing with Igntion - making reports!
Yes that is a fair criticism. The Reporting module is slated for a major overhaul and improvement in the second half of this year and so we’ll revamp the user manual for it at that time.