I am attempting to connect ignition to a Citizen Swiss lathe. Is ignition compatible with MTConnect?
We don’t have any support for MTConnect.
You can use Kepware though, which does have an MTConnect driver, and the make an OPC UA connection to their server.
You are missing out on a significant portion of the market by ignoring MTConnect.
Seriously though, I’ll try to keep it on the radar for after 8.0.
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Innorobix Automation developed an MTConnect module for Ignition that can be connected to multiple agents. The neat feature about this module is that it will dynamically create and sort the associated tags per agent and make them available in designer under providers.
Feel free to reach out if you want to see a demo.
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What are the benefits of getting MTConnect data into Ignition? I can think of OEE as the only obvious usage, but other than that? Reports? Dashboards? Will Ignition not be an overkill for it? Would appreciate your thoughts on this.
The main push for this connector was to collect OEE data but like you mentioned, the reporting and dashboards turned out to be as important. Implementing Ignition just for the sake of OEE would be an overkill but the intent of such driver is to complement to the overall offering of Ignition and the convenience it provides.
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the tags are not creating automatically. I am on Ignition version 8.1.15
The driver is particular on the version of ignition running and the correct module version must be retrieved from us. Reach out to us on our website contact form and we can make make sure you have the correct file and get you sorted out.
We are about to start using MTConnect with some of our machines. Is Innorobix the only solution for Ignition? Or does Ignition have plans to start supporting it?
There's nothing imminent, use whatever is available now.
MTConnect is a relatively simple protocol - I used a Gateway timer script with system.net.httpGet and import the python xml library to get the few pieces of data I want from the machine.
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Since I don't know yet exactly what kind of data I'll be needing to pull from it, that might be an acceptable way to go. But if you want real-time updating of the data, isn't that a bit clunky? You'd have to execute an HTPP GET request at least once a second...
Just a note on this because I was browsing MT Connect topics.
OEE, Reports, Dashboards but more importantly ALERTS and Ignition makes it easy to integrate with other factory floor devices and software (like Maintenance).
If I can avoid one more application-specific software package, I'll do it.
Inevitably a machine monitoring solution for MT Connect won't have the flexibility of Ignition, and it's one more proprietary-report-building-system that you have to get to know.
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