Based on your own experience, ¿how many hours do you think a medium-complex project would be?
We must historize about 500 tags and develop 20 different screens of several production processes.
No reports are needed.
In my experience, it can take around 3 weeks for development and a week for testing. It really does depend on how complex the project is. If it is just realtime status and control with 500 tags and 20 screens, you can probably build it faster than 3 weeks. Adding in history is simple but if you need complex reporting or downtime systems it can take longer. You need to give yourself enough time to do IO checks, building UDTs and templates, and laying out how you want the navigation to work.
The biggest thing to be careful about is scope creep where the project scope continues to change as you develop. You will never finish version 1 if that happens. The best thing I can recommend is setting goals against a timeline.
Hope this helps.
I thought I’d chime in my $.02 on this one too.
Your mention of 500 tags and 20 screens means around 25 tags / screen, which I’m guessing are a combination of both status and HOA / setpoints for each system.
A typical screen that needs graphics, piping, color coding, and some HOA popups and some setpoints might take 4 hours. 4 hours * 20 screens = 80 hours = 2 weeks.
However, that number is assuming a number of things. You’ll need to use symbol factory or have some existing graphics or templates you can use. Creating your own graphics and templates can add a fair amount of time to a project. You’ll want to re-use your HOA / OCA / Machine Control popups if you can. Indirection makes this fairly simple if you have similar screens.
One huge time trap can be to shoot from the hip when designing. Get a rough design of the screen down on paper before starting. It helps to take the pen over the design, since it’s easy to realize pieces that are missing when you do that. Going straight into the Ignition Designer when doing a screen design makes it easy to focus on each part, and at the end realize you forgot something important, requiring several hours of re-work.
As Travis mentioned, report designing can be time consuming as well. Adding history is simple, but displaying that history data in a meaningful way to people who need it takes a little longer than just displaying a graph. I know you mention you don’t need any reports, but designing the screens that show the historic data can fall into the same category of complexity at times.
A typical project with some bells and whistles and custom designed graphics may take about double the 4 hours mentioned above, which would put you right at 4 weeks. If each system is independent, you can do your testing as you finish each screen, and roll out immediately. This is easier than coming back and testing the full system at the end, if possible.
However, if you have multiple stakeholders in the project who are going to review, provide feedback and revisions, and ask for reports, modifications, and extra displays, you might want to double the time again. For a project where supervisors and managers are closely involved, you might be looking at 8 weeks.
Naturally this is a pretty rough estimate, since I don’t know most of the details of your project. Hopefully this helps a little regardless. Good luck!
I want to re-iterate. Design your project on paper first. Walk through it with someone else pretending to operate the system. This will help you define the scope and understand the level of complexity.
I would pad your estimate for your first project. The fact that you’re asking indicates that you are probably unfamiliar with Ignition. Expect a similar learning curve as any other powerful environment. Attending a training class will cut that down significantly.
You mention 500 historical tags - roughly how many realtime tags do you expect for the 20 screens? Simple setups can be created quickly by drag and drop. It becomes more efficient to use advanced techniques such as indirect binding or custom queries if you have many states (tag inputs), but this is more complex.