Ziess CMM data into Ignition

Ignition
1

Hello all,

There is an initiative at my company to try to link part cut information(CNC machines) to the CMM measurement data. In this effort, we are looking into bringing ZIESS CMM data into Ignition and then Historizing it.

We are currently using a Kepware server to read in RFID info at the machine level(offsets and the like) and communicate this with the CMM, if this would help. Therefore we are able to get the OPC clients at the CMM’s to talk to our machine PLC’s.

Have any of you been able to do this?
What would be the best approach?

Any advice would be much appreciated!

Thank you,
Lanutoshi.

2

If I read that correctly, you already have the CMMs connected to Kepware? If so, all you need to do is connect Kepware to Ignition as an external OPC provider. Then you can use your Kepware tags directly in Ignition.

Connecting to Kepware OPC UA - Ignition User Manual 8.1 - Ignition Documentation (inductiveautomation.com)

3

Kepware doesn’t have a Zeiss driver as far as i know… Zeiss does have a database product they sell and you could hook into that for integration. I have seen them integrated before. I think that is how they did it then. Zeiss PiWeb has an api as well.

4

Yes, the CMM’s are connected to Kepware. We have been using Kepware to send CNC machine offset data from production machines to the CMM’s.

The issue is that the CMM outputs its reports in the form of .txt files. I’m trying to figure out if it would be easier to get these reports in the database through Ignition.

5

Do you know what this database product is called? I guess bringing CMM data into Ignition through another database that is already populated and configured would make more sense.

6

The Zeiss database product would be a cleaner integration, seeing as you probably could make a database connection to that database as long as it has a JDBC driver available for it.

Another way would be to read the text files and parse them in Ignition using system.file.readFileAsString().
The text file would need to be saved to the Ignition gateway, or you would have to have a Vision client on the machine where the text file lives.

7

The database was part of the Kylapso package I thought. I am sorry this was a long time ago for me and whole other industry ago for me lol

what kep driver are you talking to the CMM with? what model of Zeiss CMM

8

Thanks for your input! Will consider this option.