PlantPAx & Ignition?

Hi everyone

Anybody heard of faceplates being designed in Ignition to work with AB’s PlatnPAx AOIs?

Just finished a project using PlantPAx and it is pretty good, however their historian is just awful.

Best of both worlds would be to use Allen Bradley’s PlantPAx’s PLC instructions, but use Ignition for visualization, historical data, etc.

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One of our integrators had started on building some of the common ones as Ignition templates. Not sure if they finished them all or not. But yes, it’s certainly doable (and would be fantastic if they were released!)

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Our company has done that. I started about 2 years ago ‘pulling’ apart the templates and getting them to work with AOI. Only issue with Ignition is the path to the PLC in the OPC-UA server is different for V21 and up, so i have two sets of templates, v20 and V21+

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Well, good to know it can be done.
Is that something you/they would be willing to share with the community?

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Ditto on that willing to share question?

OK,
here is what we done. I will use an Ethernet VFD as an example. We took the Rockwell AOI and stripped out all the BS an nonsense, and optimized it as our own:


In Ignition a Template tag was created my ‘moi’ to point to this AOI

I created a template based on the PlantPax template for a VFD. When area around pump is pressed, template popup is called passing the template tag as a parameter

:

I need to add that each of the ‘tabs’ are just a container that has visibility enabled based on the menu button pressed.
Home button sets display property to 0, Info button sets a display property to 1, etc.
Each container’s visibility is based on value of the property.
0 = Home Visible
1 = Info visible

etc

Indirect template tags are used every where, where the path to the template tag is passed into this ‘popup’ as a parameter.

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Our company has done this.
PAx objects are VERY tag intensive.
I know the guys had to do some weird stuff to keep the client update rates decent. Otherwise things grind to a crawl tag update wise.

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Would you be willing to send me these?

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Did you see Flintium on GitHub?
It is based Plantpax 4.6 pretty descent work.

Hi Everyone! I really like what you all have done. Is there anyway to get these faceplates? I really don't have time to build them all. I really appreciate any assistance. Thank you!

:smile:

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That is cool.
Who made this?

:sweat_smile:

Hi I appreciate the response. Is Flintium for Perspective or Vision? I see nothing about that on the website. Thank you.

If you look at the folder names in the github Flintium repo, it is obviously for Vision.

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I was just going to reply along these lines. I haven't done PAX stuff but one of my coworkers was showing it to me and it was very tag intensive.

Ignition's AB drivers are limited to use the documented interfaces AB releases as the OPC interfaces to their equipment. FactoryTalk Linx Gateway uses a proprietary driver that uses undocumented API calls to pull the information a LOT faster.

If you're planning to use PAX infrastructure I would recommend budgeting to put in FactoryTalk Linx Gateway to handle the PLC comms and read tags from that as an OPC server so you can sub a ton of tags with minimal impact.

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Thank you! I sincerely appreciate your assistance! Have a great day!

Meh. That requires deploying Windows as a critical part of your operations environment--engineering malpractice in my book.

You can get most of the performance of FactoryTalk Linx (all of it, in many cases) by deploying my alternate EtherNet/IP driver, without putting your operations at risk. Competitively priced, too.

/shameless plug

A fair plug. I thought about tagging you and saying your driver is another option.

My main point was that you should use something other than the AB driver for Ignition on tag heavy apps.

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Editing the AOIs to use UDTs is also an option, although probably a terrible one considering the amount of work that would be required.

Some of the PlantPax AOIs are now built into the firmware (with non-readable members), so editing those is not an option. I highly recommend not using those--make copies and edits if you can.

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