My Supervisor would like to be able to pull up a live view of all the vision displays we have running through some simple interface so he can remotely monitor them. I know Perspective would be the better solution but Vision is what we have licenses for at the moment. Any thoughts, Ideas?
Do you mean live screen captures? Or just basic data?
Screen captures would be ok, I think he wanted live video but no interaction just viewing. He is not that tech savvy so I am not sure how a VPN would work for him. I was thinking something like an internal website that just displays a screen. I know what I am asking is difficult ish.
This would indeed be tricky, especially if you care at all about performance.
The 'simple' approach would be to use system.print.createImage to get a snapshot (at whatever rate) using a script in each client. Then you could use system.util.sendMessage to broadcast those image bytes from each client back to the gateway (or another session somewhere).
If you're concerned about bandwidth, you could use local CPU time on each client machine to encode into a lossy format/rescale the image down. That's going to be hard on your client machines if they're resource constrained.
Another option would be to work entirely outside of Vision. That's going to end up being a lot more efficient in terms of bandwidth and CPU usage, but is likely going to require more networking effort.
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Is VNC not an option?
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Paul, after discussing this matter internally I think this method you outlined is the best method, I just need to create an image and drop the file in a designated folder and the IT team will pull the files and just update a SharePoint site. This is not control data as much as it is about politics. It doesn’t need to be “live” but more “up to date”. So considering that, if you are willing can you describe with more detail how I would implement? I have setup two folders on the gateway and my intent it to dump the image in the respective folders for the two cells this gateway controls. Thanks in advance!
When you say “all Vision Displays”, what do you mean? Multiple vision screens from a running project that would depend on navigation as to which screen is currently displayed? Screens across multiple vision projects?
After the fact without this functionality designed, it’s going to be difficult within Ignition. Best solution is a hardware one that mirrors the clients on the production floor.
On my apps, the default login is view only, so anyone can pull up a project and not control anything. But that requires setting permissives on every input/button component.
You should experiment with the links Paul provided. See the scare quotes around simple ? Short of writing the code for you, I'm not sure how much more detail can reasonably be provided.
Try.
Understood, thanks for your patience.