#1 Changemaker Community Live!

00:00
Jaco
Good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining us online and welcome to episode one, or our first change maker community live for this year, for 2021, and the first one ever, in fact. My name is Jaco from element eight. I’m joined with some of the element eight team. We have Lenny Smith, who’s our customer success manager. We have Clarice, who looks after all our marketing and brand. And then we have Laura, who’s new to the team. Welcome to the team, Laura. Laura is joining in Lenny’s team as a customer success engineer. So thank you for joining us. We know that it’s very difficult to get an hour out of anybody’s time nowadays. There’s a million other things you could have been doing. Thanks for joining us. Change Maker Community live, what is it about? These will be done quarterly.

00:40
Jaco
It’s probably the easiest way for us to just encapsulate probably the most important updates and notes from element eight within 1 hour. So if you’re going to spend an hour with us live or virtually do make an effort to attend the change maker community live. We’ll be having these at the end of every quarter, end of March, following what will obviously be the end of June. All right, what do we have with us for today as far as the agenda is concerned? Quickly go through the updates. So we will be kicking off with product updates, specifically what’s new in the world of ignition, canary and flow. We’ll be talking about some new training offerings. Enablement will cover a couple of aspects of what is available to you in terms of just getting familiar with the software, some new guides and so on.

01:31
Jaco
Support, very important in the sense of technical support. Just how to go about getting technical support. There’s quite a big change on the flow software side. For the win. We want to speak a little bit about some new customers, new success stories, as well as certifications from our partner system, integrated partner community. And then the feature for today, or the feature item for today is ten steps to a sustainable Scada. So what the feature is about is every change maker live will be focusing on a specific industry vertical and sharing a couple of insights there with somebody who’s an expert in that field. We’re certainly not the experts. We’re kicking it off today with a focus on the water industry, or more specifically, ten steps to a sustainable Scada, which is actually quite universal to multiple industries.

02:19
Jaco
But we’ll be kicking that one off today with Brian Cooper from Intech. And then hopefully we will have enough time for a live Q A. The Q A, by the way, you can type those while we’re presenting. You can ask us those questions in the relevant box and we’ll answer those at the end of the call. But again, thank you very much for joining us for the first episode of Change Maker Live.

02:40
Lenny
Some of you guys might have seen Brian on the videos as well. We’ll get to Brian and introduce him a little bit later, but I will quickly just go through a little bit of the product updates and product recap that we’ve got, and I’m going to cover all three of the products that we’ve got in our stack, obviously ignition canary as well as flow. First up is ignition. Just a little bit of a recap of the current version that we are on. So currently version 8.13 is available for download. 8.14 is actually available as a release candidate and these versions do get released quite often. So you’ll see in a little bit in the roadmap that I’m going to show you is how often do we get a new release. Just to recap that 8.1 is what we call an LTS support release.

03:26
Lenny
So that means it will be the long term support cycle of the solution and that’s going to be around for another five years that will continuously give updates and bug fixes on that platform if we look at a little bit of the monthly release cycle, as I mentioned. So 8.1 has been released in November last year already, and you can see as we progress through the updates, it’s pretty much almost every month except January that we almost had a new upgrade and a new version. And currently, as I mentioned, 8.14 is in that release candidate. So you can go and check out what the new features are. I just want to highlight a few of these new features on the ignition platform are kind of very important as well.

04:06
Lenny
For those of the guys that’s still on the old 7.9 platform, there is a little bit of a guide to guide you through the upgrade process to get to 8.1. If you are already on 8.0, no problem. You can go and upgrade to the latest platform. So just be aware that there is a guide that you can get on the inductive website. Let’s look a little bit about just a little bit of the features that we’ve got in 8.1. Very cool. They’ve added in this concept of a quick start guide. The quick start guide you can go and enable when you install your ignition system for the first time. It comes with predefined dashboards, charts, layouts, just a little bit of ways to help you get going and how to utilize the new functions and features that’s available in the new version.

04:49
Lenny
So that’s pretty cool. Also, what we have is a little bit of improvements in the designer just to make your design experience much faster and much better. And you’ll notice that, for instance, I’ve got a long pipeline notification on the screen, but you’ll notice that there’s these little wizards to guide you. So you can either go and select the blank one or choose from a priority or an escalation pipeline just to guide you to very quickly get yourself going. And a lot of these components has these little wizards now, not just the alarms but also the name queries as well as a SQL bridge module will come with these little predefined setups. My favorite one for sure is the support for Docker. Now the guys that don’t know Docker, it’s pretty much a little Linux VM that you can run.

05:35
Lenny
Ignition now supports official Docker images on the Docker hub that you can pull and download. And we see this quite often that now even panel pcs and panel pieces.

05:46
Jaco
Of equipment and hardware touch panels.

05:48
Lenny
Correct is now Docker supported so you can actually pull the latest version of Docker onto and start playing with it. And I’ll do a little bit of a live demo when I’m just done here with features on how Docker works and how you can get that very.

06:00
Jaco
Quickly up and running.

06:02
Lenny
Cool.

06:03
Lenny
From a usability perspective, they’ve added in gateway auditing so you know what has been audited changed in your gateway settings. They added in IDP support. So if you want to use your identity providers or federated identity providers to log into ignition, you can utilize them. They’ve also added the capability for the IDPs login to also include the designer, the gateway, and not just the perspective project so you can utilize your identity providers for login. And lastly, obviously Perspective has got a great new of usability features. Very important is the new power chart functionality that they’ve added. They’ve also included a whole bunch of mimics and symbols that you can now add to your perspective project. If you want to still draw a little bit more mimic type of applications in perspective, you can definitely do that.

06:52
Lenny
And very important, the release of what we call perspective workstation. Perspective being a browser, obviously there’s a few things with that. You don’t have multimonitor support, you can’t lock the pc down. So what they’ve done is they brought in perspective workstation to cater for that multimonitor support kiosk mode lockdown and give the browser or the session the capability then to talk to the serial drive of the pc, et cetera.

07:17
Jaco
Very important. Just make sure that you as a designer or an admin actually know how to get out of the kiosk. You may have missed it around the licensing, so the licensing also changed in that regard. So you may have been familiar with various iterations of how the licensing or client licensing worked. Specifically for the latest version of perspective that comes in three flavors. One is obviously the browser based or pure web. The second one is the workstation or the kiosk mode that Lenny mentioned now. And the third one is obviously the mobile or the app specific version.

07:47
Lenny
Correct. So you can use if you buy a perspective license, that session is available to all three of those components.

07:53
Lenny
Cool.

07:54
Lenny
Then obviously no releases without a little bit of fixes. So they did fix a little bit of bugs that we have in the solution. So they fixed the expression structure fix in the perspective bindings, the on screen keyboard got a little bit of a fix in the overall and then just overall gateway network improvements have been improved in this release. Now obviously this is just a very small subset of the solution or of the improvements that’s been done in the versions. You can go to their website. Obviously two things that you can look at is documentation. The documentation is really great. You can see what is all the new components that’s been added to a version. And obviously on the download tabs you can go and look at the release notes. Now you saw that these releases are quite often right.

08:39
Lenny
So I do encourage you guys to go and look at least every month.

08:44
Jaco
To see what is the new versions, et cetera. It’s very well documented as well. Extremely.

08:49
Lenny
Right now let me quickly show you the docker. So this for me is very exciting. So yeah, I’ve got Docker dashboard running. I’ve already pulled an image from Docker Hub for ignition and you’ll notice that I can tag them. So this is the actual nightly build. So what that means is I can get the latest release as the developers are done with it, build it on their server, and I can pull that nightly release without going to having it download a full version of ignition every time I want to play with a new feature. So I can literally go and pull the image from Docker Hub. I’ve done it already this morning, so you’ll see mine is already up to date. So that is the latest hub that’s available on ignition and I can literally go and run this guy.

09:34
Jaco
Now that nightly build is quite a nice feature. Maybe a lot of people are not aware of it, but you actually have a daily access and update to the current developed underdevelopment.

09:45
Lenny
Obviously not something you will run in production.

09:47
Lenny
Exactly.

09:47
Jaco
Not for live production.

09:48
Lenny
Also not the release candidates. I won’t run in production. But yes, if you’re waiting for a bug to get fixed or a new feature and you want to test it out on your application very quickly to pull the latest. Obviously what I need to do is I just need to tell Docker which Gateway port from ignition do I want to forward to my host? Right. So obviously we know the default Gateway port for inductive is 80 88. And I’m just going to map that to my port on my local machine to 80 82 and I’m going to go and run this guy. So we’re going to start it. Docker does give some quite nice names to the instances condescending Caleb. Currently I’ve got Brian noise running here and it’s running on port 80 82.

10:31
Lenny
So if I go to my browser and I type in localhost and I go to port 80 82. There we go. There’s rand new instance of ignition running ready for me to commission and install. So I encourage you guys to check it out. Very easy, very quick to get it up and running, and it’s very cool to check out these latest versions and components that’s available. All right, let’s get back to a little bit deeper into sepasoft now for you guys that don’t know that, there is a company that builds mes solutions on top of the ignition platform.

11:07
Jaco
It’s called Sepersoft, specifically designed for ignition.

11:11
Lenny
Specifically designed for ignition. And the cool thing is that they currently release three versions of their OEe solutions.

11:19
Lenny
Guys.

11:20
Lenny
Oee. That is obviously in a little bit of the mes world to get a look at your overall equipment efficiency. And obviously with ignition edge being capable of running on a little bit of edge devices, they’re bringing out the OEe solution for edge so we can get a low cost Oee solution actually running on the ignition edge platform for a really small application. So that’s great.

11:43
Jaco
Quick question we had yesterday, in fact, this morning around the OEE. So that is an actual full install on your oe device component. Just remember to delete the installed files after the fact.

11:53
Lenny
Yeah, it does take up a little bit of files on these little Moxo.

11:57
Jaco
Routers or whatever you’re going to use quickly on Oee. Just on the topic of Oee. If you’re not familiar with OEE at all, there is a podcast that we did with Walker Reynolds probably a couple of months ago.

12:05
Lenny
Correct.

12:06
Jaco
Where we spoke about delve a little bit deeper in terms of what OEe is, why you want to use and measure it.

12:13
Lenny
Relevant metric.

12:14
Jaco
It is still the relevant metric.

12:15
Lenny
Great.

12:16
Lenny
All right. If you want to see what is the differences between the versions of the OEe components, obviously you can go and browse to the link I’ve got down. Don’t worry about these links. We will share all the relevant links that we’re listing here in the future with you guys afterwards. So you can go and look at these after the fact.

12:36
Lenny
Cool.

12:37
Lenny
That’s ignition and supersoft. Just a quick update on that. Very exciting for small applications. Definitely on the Canary side, Canary’s versioning is a little bit different. They go with the year. So when you see a Canary version 21, that means it’s for the year of 2021 again. They also have quite an aggressive release cycle. So if we go back to a little bit of October 2020, they released version 20.34, and you’ll notice as we go on, it actually is also very aggressive, almost monthly again. And they released version 21, or the first version for this year in February 2021. They are currently in beta for 21 one. And there’s some quite new features and exciting features on that side. A little bit of the features that’s included in that is there’s a line tool now on Axiom.

13:35
Lenny
That’s quite cool. Very cool.

13:37
Lenny
Because now I can actually build a nice mimic type ish application within my axiom dashboard. I’ll actually show that to you guys. You can make the line blue and I’ll show you that as well. Interesting kind of calculation. They’ve added. They’ve added in a calculation where I can get the previous value of a current value in restore it. So if you want to do deltas or you want to see what is the rate of change for something, you can use the previous value calculation. They’ve extended their APIs to actually now bring you back any assets that you’ve defined within your canary views. So if you use the virtual views, I can go and use that and.

14:12
Jaco
See that as well.

14:13
Lenny
Usability perspective. This is a big one for me. On the MqtT UI, it was something that was done kind of in the back end to get the MqtT integrated into Canary. There’s a nice new UI for that. I’ll show you that.

14:27
Jaco
Just a configuration panel.

14:28
Lenny
Correct. And you don’t have to go and figure it out in a SQL database. They’ve added intellisense for their functions and tags and the calculations. And the nice thing is that you can also install the view service without installing the storing component. So in the past if you had a multi architectural solution, you had to install the storing component with the view service. They split that out and installer and you can now just install view service on a particular piece of hardware. Architecture obviously also fixes. This is quite a big one for us. In South Africa if you use a comma as a decimal separator like we and the Dutch, I don’t know why, but we don’t use dots like all the normal countries, then it couldn’t figure out which Excel version is installed on your laptop and installer would crash.

15:16
Lenny
So that’s been fixed. That’s quite a big fix for us. There was also a failure when you tried to add MQTT connection via anonymous login and there was also a bug when copying calculations. The expression did not evaluate to the new copied calculation. It still showed you the old result from where you copied.

15:37
Jaco
So we see a lot of functionality being built out specifically around MQTT. And you’re probably going to hear us speak about MQtT quite a lot over the next couple of minutes. And it definitely MQtT feels like at moment in terms of pulled out of technology that a lot is being catered for and designed for specifically MQTT. And there’s a lot of good reasons for that and we’ll elaborate on that a little later.

15:59
Lenny
Cool.

16:00
Lenny
Let me show you guys some of these new things, right? Let’s get docker.

16:06
Lenny
Cool.

16:07
Lenny
This is version 21.1. You’ll notice that I’ve already upgraded to the beta and you’ll notice that I’ve got the MQtT collector here already configured. Now in the olden days, sounds like last week you had to actually go into a little bit of goose chase to get this thing configured. So if I go to canary lags here, I go to the logger, I go in here, MqtT. There was this little SQl lite file that you had to go and configure in the tables of how you want to configure your MqTT. Which broker do you want to connect, which topics do you want to subscribe? It wasn’t really user friendly. It was also a little bit of owners. So they created this little MQTT connector tile here for us.

16:57
Lenny
And now I can see how many tags I’ve got subscribed and I can actually go and click on this configuration section here. And I have a nice GUI where I can go and configure my browser. I can go and configure which subscriptions do I want to connect to? What is the quality of service that I want to connect to? So everything is now at least nicely in agree for us to go and configure. And obviously they utilize the Spark plug B implementation of MQTT to automatically add the tags and see those tags in there.

17:24
Jaco
Spark plug B. There was another podcast comes to mind with Arlene when we speak a little bit more about MQtT and specifically spark plug B and why it is future really, right?

17:35
Lenny
So that’s the first thing that they’ve changed is the GUI for the MQTT. Then on the calculations, as we saw the little bit of intellisense in calculations, I’ve got a whole bunch of calculations here, but if I go and edit one of these calculations, you’ll see that there’s a nice intellisense of that. Let me rather just create a new one. So I’m going to add a new calculation. And you’ll notice now in the calculation expression, when I start to add a function, it’s going to nicely give it to me in a blue color. So we know that functions is colored blue. So let’s do something like if I want to know what is the minimum of a particular tag, functions is now blue. And then when I add an actual tag into my solution here, tags will be colored in orange.

18:21
Lenny
So you’ve got a little bit of intellisense in the functions editor now. So you actually know what you’re doing. What is a little bit more intuitive, what is the actual function and what is the actual tags that you are building the expression for?

18:32
Lenny
Cool.

18:33
Lenny
And then lastly, very quickly, that I want to show is obviously the lines in axiom. So this is axiom. This is their dashboarding and trending capability tool. Now, I always add the capability in axiom to add symbols, right? So if I add a symbol to the screen here, I don’t know, I.

18:49
Jaco
Can maybe add a little bit of.

18:50
Lenny
A valve to go and create a little bit of a dashboard for myself. And let’s also go and add a little bit of a tank. So if I want to now go and configure potentially a line between my valve and my tank that I’m adding here, you’ll notice that I now have the capability to add a line. So there’s a new component in axiom, which is the line component. I know it sounds a little silly, but I can now go and configure a line.

19:19
Jaco
That was really the only thing.

19:23
Lenny
So I can now configure a line. The nice thing about the line is I can actually hook the line up to data in historian. So I can go and give it a source tag so I can say, let’s look at the flow that goes between the valve and the tank. So there’s a flow needs to this. I’m going to add that flow and then I can add limits so I can say, you know what, I want to know if the value is greater than two. If there’s flow, change the line to, I don’t know, bluish color. And there we go.

19:50
Jaco
That’s very cool.

19:52
Lenny
It’s a functional ad to the line component as well, so you can really go and build some nice cool dashboards on that component.

20:00
Lenny
Cool.

20:00
Lenny
Just quickly wanted to show you guys a little bit of that feature as well.

20:06
Lenny
Cool.

20:06
Lenny
And then the last product, obviously the documentation and the release notes also available on their website. We will share these links as well after the fact. Flow, last one in our stack that we just want to quickly cover. So flow version 4.5.4 is coming at the end of April, a little bit on Flow’s release cycle as well. You’ll notice that we released version 5.3 in June 22 and in July we’ve released 5.33. So in flow it’s a little bit more like a bimonthly every two months we try to get a little bit of a minor release out. Where we’re currently at is version 5.35. That was the last minor for the five three release, and now we’re going to release 5.4 at the end of April. That’s a big one. A lot of features coming in.

20:54
Lenny
So if I can look at the features for Flow, we’re adding in model security so you can secure the parts of your model based on who’s logged into the configuration tool. We’re adding in a data source for influxDB, so extending the reach of silos of information that we can get into flow with that. Influxdb.

21:11
Jaco
What is that collection made up of at the moment? Just a quick reader.

21:13
Lenny
Sure.

21:14
Lenny
It is made up of obviously canary, historian, inductive historian, SQL database, Excel, wonderware, Aviva historian, Oracle database, Prosgrig, and Mysql. So we’re extending the reach of and obviously very important manual data that people can manually enter. So extending the reach of our data sources. We adding in some cool enhancements for event triggering where an event can trigger another event, et cetera. So that’s going to be quite a big feature for us. From the usability perspective, we are including template charts and dashboards. That is quite a cool feature. I’ve got a little bit of a video, just of a little bit of snippets from development, obviously with still the raw beta version, but I’ll show you guys how that works. We’re also going to be able to templatize our events. So currently in Flow, we can templatize our model components, our measures.

22:05
Lenny
We’re going to add consumers and events to that templatizability. And very importantly, we’re going to add copy and paste. I know it sounds simple, but the whole idea with a copy and paste is not just to copy and paste inside your own flow model, but you can actually copy and paste between flow instances. So if you’ve got a development environment, copy it to your production environment and off you go.

22:26
Jaco
That’s been a hot topic request.

22:27
Lenny
Yes, and we’re trying to make it for any component, not just the model, the charts, the dashboards, et cetera. And we’re also including exports and import.

22:35
Lenny
Functionality for those components.

22:37
Lenny
And then obviously we’ve got a little bit of fixes and updates. There was a namespace rendering issue with our SQL consumer. We’re adding in from an update perspective, we’re adding support for. NET core 3.1 and. NET framework 4.8. So keeping up with the technology. And we’re also going to add minutely retrieval types up until 1 minute. So probably, you guys probably know that currently flow only support minutely updates to five minutely buckets. We are going to reduce that. You can actually go and have a minutely update of an aggregation calculation within flow.

23:11
Lenny
Correct.

23:12
Lenny
Got a little bit of a video here from development guys. This is 4.5, still in its beta or 5.45.4. Sorry. Dyslexics. Lenny on the roll here. Yes, Daleksis untied. So please, I just want to show you the templatizing of the reports and the dashboards. All right, so this is the configuration tool. What I’m going to do is I’m going to just build a new dashboard quickly for us. So I’m going to go build a dashboard and what I’ve got is a whole bunch of electricity meters on my filling line. So I’m measuring the amount of electricity that’s been used.

23:47
Jaco
This could be your typical kind of utilities view.

23:48
Lenny
Typical kind of utilities view, et cetera. So I’m going to build a time based table report. And normally what we had to do in the sections is I had to go and add from my model all of those components individually, right? So I had to manually build out this thing. But because I’m using templates, I’m actually going to just drag the one template. Now, flow now knows how many instances has been derived from that template. So when I open up this report, it’s not just going to show me the one, it’s going to show me all of the filling line instances in the report. So you’ll notice that if I open up my dashboard here, there I go, I’ve got both of them, right, but I’ve only added in the one from the template.

24:27
Lenny
So I’m utilizing the template technology to very quickly and rapidly build out my reporting. Now, obviously this is now showing them into one section, the electricity section. But what I could have done is I could have dragged the actual template metric onto my report as well. That will then create a section for each instance.

24:46
Lenny
Right?

24:46
Lenny
Again, I’m going to do exactly the same. I’m going to drag that daily metric across. And if I refresh my report now, you’ll notice that each filler will have its own metric. All right, so gone are the days. If I have to go and manually add these things again and again to the report, it will automatically update there. You can see the two sections there. The really cool thing is, even if I instantiate new guys from that template, if I create a new one from that metric, so let’s quickly create energy for filler number three. I don’t have to do anything to report, I just have to instantiate filler number three from the template. Obviously hook it up to the correct tag in the historian where it needs to get the energy usage file from.

25:31
Lenny
So I’m just going to quickly add that to the retrieval. So there, I’ve got my namespace in my story and I’m going to add the electricity component there and deploy it. And if I refresh, filler number three will be automatically into the list without me having to edit the dashboard or the chart. So very excited for that feature. It’s going to save a lot of time. We are including this not just to table charts and reports. So I’m going to just add it very quickly to a time based, a normal time based chart, also a daily chart. Do the same concept here. I’m going to use my template to populate this chart, not the individual instances. And again, you’ve got the same capability, right?

26:14
Lenny
Either adding it on its own axes or using the metric to add it as two separate stacks in the chart. So luckily that’s all I have to do. If I go back to my front end and refresh, you’ll notice that I’ve got a new component on the dashboard and it’s now going to show me my electricity meters in a normal time based charge with limits stats for each and one of the fillers. So that’s quite cool. That’s very exciting for us. From the flow side is the charting template capability.

26:48
Lenny
Cool.

26:49
Lenny
Where to find it? Again, we will share this with us, but again, there is full documentation and release notes on the latest versions. And please guys, just remember to check that by monthly from a flow perspective.

26:59
Lenny
Cool.

27:00
Lenny
With that, I’m going to hand over to Laura to talk a little bit about the upcoming training and what’s new in training.

27:06
Jaco
Fantastic. And before you do, just if you have any questions on any of these products, if you are a user of ignition canary flow, you have any questions, let us know in the chat or connect with us afterwards.

27:16
Lenny
Thanks all.

27:17
Laura
Yeah. Okay, cool. Thank you, Lenny. Hi everyone. So I’ll be covering the training courses and resources as well as our new university engagement program that we will be implementing in South Africa this year. So first up is our new advanced ignition training course. Now we cover the newest version of ignition as Lenny has explained, and the course has been extended over five days instead of the previous three day course. Now it’s been the first day only covering the basics of SQL, some python coding, and how to integrate the bb into the ignition gateway for the rest of the week. Basically we build an awesome machine scheduling system. So Lenny, what exactly do we cover in that?

27:57
Lenny
Yeah, so we are actually building a nice machine scheduling solution. So which work orders do you.

28:03
Laura
Yes, I have your study material from Unisa.

28:10
Lenny
Say again?

28:12
Laura
I have your study material from Unisa.

28:21
Jaco
I can’t hear clearly. No, not clearly.

28:27
Lenny
You need. Okay, cool.

28:33
Jaco
Not sure what that was. Sorry.

28:37
Lenny
Yeah, so we’re creating a machine scheduling solution. So you can actually run specific tasks and work orders on a machine. You can move the machines around, allocating different work orders to the machine. Everything is done with a database in the back end and some python scripting. So it’s quite a nice advanced course.

28:54
Jaco
Just to confirm that the advance, the requirement for the advance is obviously to do the core.

28:59
Lenny
Yeah, we have to do the core, unfortunately, before and because it’s quite hectic, the components that we do in the advanced course, definitely.

29:07
Laura
Okay, cool. And then secondly, our new flayo training course. Flay has also been extended from three to five days when the first few days we provide core flow training, and then in the last two days, the advanced flow training. And then two of the subjects that we cover are realized OEE applications and database integration.

29:26
Lenny
Yeah.

29:27
Lenny
And I would also strongly recommend that you first do the call before you come in the advanced flow training. Definitely. You need to have the call. Basic understanding before you can do the advanced.

29:37
Laura
Definitely. And then lastly, coming up is our Durban training in April, in the week of the 20th, and about three days are dedicated to the ignition perspective training and two days to canary systems training. So make sure to check out our training dates and packages to take advantage of our new training.

29:58
Jaco
And that’s our first training in Durban. First local training in Durban.

30:01
Lenny
We did a remote session in town a few weeks ago, which was lovely, by the way. We saw the mountain. Actually, the next one will be in Durban from a region perspective.

30:13
Lenny
Cool.

30:13
Laura
All right, so you can get even more out of ignition by visiting inductiveuniversity.com. The sign up process is quick and cost free. Now, on inductive university, we offer hundreds of free ignition videos, and there’s also lots of helpful documentation in our online user manual. Next, we offer the same service with free canary training videos that basically covers courses about axiom trend graphs, axiom applications, and then the canary Excel add in.

30:45
Lenny
Cool.

30:45
Jaco
And that’s actually three courses. I actually thought it was three videos, but it’s actually three complete courses on its own.

30:53
Laura
And you can also access these videos online at learn canarylabs.com. And sign up requires just a little bit of your time and no cost from your cool. Now, next up. Okay, cool. So the university engagement program, it’s a new project that we will introduce to the universities in South Africa this year. Now, the project aims to foster relationships in our communities by creating a bridge between the industry, professionals, and educational institutions. Now, we want to improve creativity and innovation through exposing the university to ignition software. Now, the goal is to get ignition into the hands of as many students as possible. Now, even with the pandemic sidelining education for several months of 2020, the UEP was able to take off currently 32 academic institutions using ignition within their curriculum, spanning over 13 different academic programs.

31:58
Laura
Now, these institutions are from seven different countries, and from this year on, we will be part of those countries. I actually spoke to Annie yesterday and she said that it’s about nine countries at the moment, so I think we’ll be dependent. So it’s increasing day by day, and the current academic programs that ignition are using is somewhere away the lines of computer science, computer, electrical, mechanical engineering. And there’s about nine more different academic programs that are using the ignition software.

32:36
Lenny
Cool.

32:37
Jaco
That’s basically what is included. So when we say university program is basically ignition being used for free at no charge at any educational or tertiary institution.

32:47
Laura
So what inductive automation will be providing? The universities are licensing for the professors to students in laboratory setting. And like you said, it’s free to use. So they can use it for education, they can use it for projects, they can use it for. Students actually have access to the maker edition for private use, but they can build their own little projects which I think is very cool. And then all the needed resource materials to establish ignition into the curriculum and all round support and communication between the universities and the industry partners to provide a beneficial experience for the university.

33:27
Lenny
Cool.

33:27
Jaco
So on that if you the call to action really is from our side. If you in your network are familiar with a lecturer, dean, anybody at a faculty of engineering, anybody that you have in your network that you think this would be useful to. Obviously we’ll be reaching out to a couple of institutions, but in your network, if you know of anybody, let us know. We’d love to chat with.

33:47
Laura
Be great to hear if anyone’s interested in actually taking a look at ignition and playing around with it, maybe see if they can use it. So we agree that this would beneficial for a lot of south african universities as college create ample job opportunities for students.

34:03
Lenny
That’s the whole idea, yeah.

34:07
Laura
No, that’s the whole idea is to get students to get a first hand experience with ignition using modern scalar and then when they’re done graduating there will be a very good chance for them to get a job offer, make it.

34:21
Jaco
A little bit easier, make it a little bit more marketable.

34:25
Laura
Like Yaka said, we’d love to receive any questions and suggestions from your side regarding this program.

34:32
Lenny
Awesome, right?

34:34
Laura
So I’ll be handing over to Kiri. Thanks Laura. Okay, we’ll just quickly give you an update about the assets and resources that’s freely available to your team that we’ve been creating and publishing the last year. So last year we’ve launched powerful technical how to sessions and these videos are available freely on our website and YouTube channel. This is really great content that we’ve created for the community to self learn, admission, canary and flow, or any issues that you might have experienced in the past. It’s a very quick guide to just show you and tell you how you can fix yourself and then if you another way. We actually launched a podcast called the Human Machine Podcast last year.

35:27
Jaco
We’re not professionals, but it’s good. Yeah, I can’t judge but it’s great conversation.

35:35
Lenny
Very.

35:36
Laura
And this year we actually decided to launch a future of and trend series where we sit with the industry legends that talk about reviews of the industry in the future. So if you want to be part of the postcards and the conversation, please reach out to the info new candidates and fresh free conversations every month. So it will be great to be.

36:00
Lenny
In touch, not just for the podcast, please guys, if you’ve got any ideas for a technical video as well, if you’re struggling with a certain concept and you want me to look at it, make a little bit of a video from the technical out sessions, please get in contact with.

36:17
Laura
So flow also launched some very interactive demos and dashboards for specific industries that’s freely available on their website to interact with. So again, we’ll share the links with you after the session and two powerful guides was launched by inductive automation. The first one is the perspective planning checklist.

36:41
Lenny
That’s useful.

36:42
Laura
Yeah, it’s very useful. And this is to get the best out of your perspective project. And the second one is the ignition and deployment best practices. It’s also a very good guide that will help you better understand how to deal with deployment sorry applications and provide some best practices for setting up your deployment and testing workflows, especially if you’re.

37:07
Jaco
Doing your first project or not, even if you’ve done a project before. Definitely useful stuff.

37:13
Lenny
Yeah.

37:13
Laura
So again, we’ll share these things with you afterwards where you can download it and interact and use it wherever necessary. Again, Canary also launched a new and upgraded sandbox environment for Axiom where you can reconsider great content to explain use cases based design principles which utilizing the assets, harden to build quick dashboards. Again, you can start from scratch and it’s a very interactive demo tool that you can make use of and then you will cover the support side of flow that have changed at element eight.

37:54
Lenny
Cool.

37:55
Lenny
Thanks guys. Just from a support perspective, obviously we at element eight do have a full fledged ticketing system where people can go and lock support tickets for any of the three products in the stack, ignition, canary and now obviously flow as well. So the guys that’s been used to lock tickets via flow, you’ll notice on the flow website that we do have the new details in there to log support via us at year at elements eight, it’s important to log these tickets. The reason is obviously twofold. Right. We want to have a formal log of the ticket. We want to also track our responsiveness to you guys from a ticketing perspective. And we definitely don’t want to have any support tickets fall through the cracks because we didn’t have it physically locked.

38:39
Lenny
So I encourage you guys, lock these tickets, get them up and running. We are now officially handling flow supports as well for Africa and Europe. So you can utilize these methods to lock the support either online, there’s a nice form that you can submit. You can even upload a file of your problem or via email just to email support at Elementate co Z. And you can also, obviously, telephone support via business hours.

39:08
Jaco
We love chatting to you on WhatsApp, but please, if it’s a tech support issue, please log the ticket.

39:13
Lenny
Yes, please. Just don’t forget to actually. All right, that’s as simple as that. Please let those tickets and I can help you guys with whatever you’re struggling from the stack perspective and get these as resolved as quick as possible.

39:27
Lenny
Cool, thanks.

39:29
Lenny
Jaco’s just going to talk a little bit about some recent success that we had inside of our community with some projects and certifications.

39:36
Lenny
Yeah.

39:36
Jaco
So the idea for the winners, we will hopefully every couple of months, share some new customers, new success stories, new projects that have been done and completed, and we’ll add that to this view. And hopefully, if you see something that’s interesting, a specific customer or industry or story, we can share some information. Not all, but we can definitely share some information around how that was deployed and used. Before we do that, though, I want to quickly highlight some of our partners. Our system integrator partners are, of course, the brilliant people that we’ve helped to train and able to skill up to help you get the best out of your software. There’s been a couple of exciting developments there. We have Eritron, the Eritron group, very excited. They are the most recent certified ignition certified system integrator, but also more exciting.

40:23
Jaco
They are the first supersoft certified integrator in Africa, I believe you can say South Africa. Africa, I think, as well. So that’s really great from Alban Kharat and the team at Eritron to become not only ignition certified, but also Sepasoft certified in literally a very short space of time. Our fourth and most recent ignition gold certified system integrator. Next, integration. Rob and his team, really excited to have them on board as a gold certified integrator, which is our fourth gold certified in South Africa. On the canary side, we have a new Canary certified partner, process automation solutions, I think. Now known as digital industries. They have become certified in Canary and also busy with a couple of exciting projects. And then very exciting for us in South Africa is we have dim controls in his team.

41:17
Jaco
They have signed up as a system integrator for the stack of products in Nigeria. So that’s really cool to have a north african partner on board as well. At the bottom, we have a couple of recent, and really, when I say a couple of recent, I’m talking about specifically January to March. We’ll update that every quarter to give an idea of some of the logos and companies that we’re adding. Technoser, really excited about that. One day they’re doing some really sexy stuff with NQTT and they’ve deployed a fairly wide, geographically disparaged system. DRD Gold. Really cool to see something in the mining space. Mike and the team are doing also some really good things with ignition Bimbo QSR, quick serving restaurant down in Cape Town. It smells amazing in that plant. Probably the best smelling plant manufacturing plant that we’ve been to.

42:05
Jaco
They of course make the bread rolls for a couple of fast food chains. Ingrain is the previously Tongart unit. Canary application over there. And then also PMC of labor mining company, also canary application. That’s a pretty big database that they’re running over there. And then the more recent one is Coca Cola beverages, that sort of full stack user of canary, ignition and flow at the moment. So that gives you a little bit of an idea of some of the verticals and some of the customers deploying the solutions at the moment. On the success story side, unfortunately, this isn’t a local story, a south african story, but this is a very cool one that we wanted to give you a little bit of an overview of. So we just going to call it a vessel project.

42:52
Jaco
It hasn’t been approved for publication yet, so we can’t give you an idea of who the fairly large global oil customer is, but we’ll just call it a vessel project for now. Vessel is obviously the very technical term.

43:05
Lenny
For a ship or a boat.

43:08
Jaco
It’s a vessel, but what the project consisted of is really a fleet of over 30 vessels. And the project will be deployed over three years. Where the competition. This is an ignition and MQTT specific architecture story. Where the competition in this case was a typical industry specific or vertical specific software that we do very often find in a lot of specialist verticals. The requirement was obviously a cloud connectivity, specifically over VSAT or satellite communication, which is, I suppose, kind of obvious as it is a vessel out in the middle of the ocean. Naturally there’s no wifi around and the architecture may be a little bit, look a little bit complex, but Lenny, I think you’re going to talk us through.

43:53
Lenny
What that looked like.

43:54
Lenny
Yeah. First of all, I did not know that a vessel has so many components on it. We used to see dmzs and stuff between enterprise solutions and current controller. They actually have three DMZ physically on the boat separating business app ERP solutions all the way down to the actual critical control solution. Now the nice thing about this is that, yes, NQTT is very modular, so you can deploy very specific modules on what you need to achieve with the solution. But people always think sometimes MQtT and they think low bandwidth reduction. In this case, MQTT was not just used for that, it was actually used to get very easily across all of these dmzs that we have in the boat to share data with all the different systems, not just process related data, actually files. So they send files across global MqtT.

44:42
Lenny
They even send IP camera data across the MQTT level to actually see real IP camera data via MQtT.

44:51
Jaco
All over MQTT, all over MQTT.

44:53
Lenny
So very great success story there. Obviously utilizing the model that’s been burst by Spark plug for that. And then obviously, as I mentioned, very efficient comps, but yeah, a little bit different from what we used to by utilizing this for file transfer and camera.

45:09
Jaco
Data typically functions people wouldn’t assume associated with MQTT.

45:14
Lenny
And then obviously having the modular capability to also deploy Azure cloud injectors, that ignition has to actually push the data into their cloud infrastructure as well.

45:23
Lenny
From azure perspective. Cool.

45:24
Jaco
Very nice, very nice story, but we’re looking forward to hopefully sharing a little bit more detail around this one when we can. If you have any other questions on, again, if you have any other questions on any of these applications or customers, we can share what is available to us and a few of them are also public. Here’s.