Hello,
We are in the middle of evaluating ignition as our future SCADA system for our Building Automation System as we refer to it. In our current Wonderware system we have this handy option to be able to right click on any value or object that has a tag attached to it and a pop up comes up. In this popup it displays the tag name which I am sure is easy to do. The other function that has become valuable to us is the ability to have the pop up add that to a new trending chart or add to an existing trend that was created.
Basically, it boils down to a new thing with troubleshooting we rarely know what we would like to trend until an issue arises. Sometimes we layer tags from multiple systems when we have an event just to try to gain some insight.
I am not sure if this could be accomplished with writing some script or if it's out of Ignitions capability. I have got a thrown together menu structure and a few screens to run different test and we are talking to one of our PLC's. If anyone has any input on this, it would be greatly appreciated.
Having this type of community for a SCADA system is really nice and there is a lot of useful information in here. Bravo to the contributors.
This is definitely doable inside of ignition, but the way to go about this differs based upon which ignition platform you are developing in. The Power Chart in your title would indicate that you are developing in Perspective, but what you are describing in the body of this post sounds more like a Vision app. Do you know which one you are going to build in: Vision or Perspective?
You're not wrong here, and this forum is really a standout feature in its own right. It's essentially your connection to information and answers from experts who've been using Ignition for the last 5, 10, 15+ years, as well as from the devs themselves (I'd like someone to tell me where you would get that level of service from an industrial scada!!)
What you're asking for is certainly possible in ignition, in both Vision and Perspective, although it doesn't come out of the box. However it's not difficult to create it either. And the benefit of not being tied to the dev's out of box functionality is that you get to do it how you/the customer wants it
I've seen this feature in another SCADA system developed by a small local company (less than 10 employees). But we didn't choose that, the reason is the nightmare manual...
In Ignition, I think all number labels can be an embedded page that configures the chart popup. Value labels come from a specific UDT type. So, only one UDT and one embedded page needs to be processed here.
I actually did a demo a few months ago, but we didn't think the feature would be useful because we knew the important labels and the charts were already created.
Apologies, for not including critical details such as the project type. We will develop in Perspective. It's good to know that how we would like to our charting to function is possible. All these things are questions that have came up over the last almost 6 months of talking about what's next. My SCADA background came from small standalone factory talk systems in wastewater, but I am defiantly seeing the benefits of being able to really create what you want. Our system would be too large to sort through the tag browser, so this is a very critical piece for us. Thanks for all the information thus far.
You can always add a search function to search for specific text in your tags, or search for device names etc. and return a filtered list to select from to trend. The possibilities are endless really. You're not confined as you once were
With the ignition perspective, I want to display 10000 variables on the web with more than one power chart. Can you tell me the variable and power chart number limit for this project and what path can I follow??
There's no specific limits. Just RAM and CPU load. (And visual clutter.) Try.
I'll check it out.
When I alter PROBS>config>pointcount. from 300 to -1, web browser slows down tremendously. can you explain that a little bit. I try this property, because when I make "-1" , trend is looking better but its slowing down on the web page.
You are swamping your browser's chart with data when you set pointcount to -1. Only do that with very short timespans, where you need to see the detail. Also, it is unwise to do this with the power chart with multiple pens, as it always does its own historian queries, and will have the duplicate entries problem. If you need to use "as stored", do your own bindings with a Time Series Chart (instead of the Power Chart), and use "Tall" return mode. (You will then need a transform to split the tall dataset by tag path to yield one variable-length series per tag.)
The pen is constantly changing even if deadband style is discrate.
The chart jitters like that because you're set to realtime mode and it's regularly re-querying and re-interpolating the data to exactly 300 points. You should see less of that if you decrease the refresh rate (which is good practice regardless if you're plotting many tags).
Deadband style won't have any impact - that just determines when a value is stored in the historian. discrete does a flat comparison of last stored value vs current value, while analog takes rate of change into account. You can read more about it here.
I think maybe the point was that this was occurring when pointCount was set to -1, but perahps not. It's not very clear what setting was being demonstrated. However, this is most certainly the biggest issue with sampled points in Ignition. In other SCADA packages, even though data points are still sampled, traversing the time axis doesn't result in points jumping around like this due to sampling. No idea how they achieve it though.
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