Discover And Explore Ignition Scada And So Much More!

00:04
Jaco
All right, 01:00 shall we get going, guys? We’ll probably have a few more people join us over the next few minutes, but let’s get cracking on. So good afternoon folks. Thank you for joining us for the first of our virtual learning series, webinars. My name is Jaco. I’ll be your co host today together with my team. And we’re so grateful to get together with you all on a Friday afternoon, especially during these extraordinary and challenging times. So we want to make this time informative and valuable to you. So thank you again for joining us. For those of you that we have not yet met, it’s really nice to see a few familiar names and people joining us. For those we have not yet met, we look forward to meeting you all soon. 

00:46
Jaco
And as eager as we are to tell you more about us, we’re also very eager to learn about you and your needs and how we can help. So on our side, we have Clarice, our marketing and brand manager, extraordinary and super Lenny Smith, who I’m sure a lot of you already know, who is our customer success and support manager. And we very excited to introduce you to the power of ignition today, which Lenny is going to take you through. But I do believe the context is everything. So before we do, just allow us a minute to be a little bit selfish and take you through who we are and introduce you to element eight, if that’s okay with everyone. So perhaps let’s start with what we believe in. We believe that innovation starts with people who turn great ideas into reality. 

01:31
Jaco
And technology is an enabler that empowers you to find creative solutions to unique needs. And people want to build bespoke systems and simply ask for ease of use to make sense of their data and make better quality decisions more often. But we know that space between human and machine often leave people asking for a workable solution that doesn’t seem possible, feasible or practical. But your people are your greatest business asset. And with element eight, we believe that you can build automation that starts with those people and why we do what we do, or really why we even exist. We’re a brand new business. Our team grew up in a manufacturing and industrial automation world, inside the factory plants on site, and at the forefront of many conference discussions about vision and evolution. 

02:17
Jaco
And over the past nearly two decades, we heard firsthand from the community how frustrated they were with complicated and expensive solutions, often with heavy reliance on experts. And you could sense the overwhelmness that the community felt with digital transformation demands depleting budgets, increasing efficiency and improving the bottom line. So we looked at the industry and we saw there was murder in decades of old architecture, particular and restricted and mostly served by conventional licensing models that were antiquated and only delivered marginal value element able to use. The industrial automation industry itself has become far too locked in and held hostage to rigidly automated, mechanical and accepted ways of doing things. So our team, fueled by the passion of providing our industry and community with a new way and experience, search for the best possible industrial automation software. 

03:13
Jaco
And today we are the proud authorized distributor of ignition, SCaDA, Canary, historian and the flow information platform. A best of breed technology stack that offers a nonsense, bespoke and unlimited licensing model, cost effective and flexible solution without complexity. And that’s of course backed by responsive, friendly and accountable technical support. Our flow team built both the canary and ignition data source connector and really offering one cohesive, productive environment that allows users to measure the contribution and impact of each team member and business unit to the overall outcome easily and through a nontechnical experience to give the power of information to the people who, as I said, are the true innovators in your business. So we don’t have a mission statement. We are on a mission to breathe new life into our industry and to provide best of breed technology for all. 

04:02
Jaco
And very important to mention that we believe in the power of community and have partner relationships at our core. Partners take the lead in any client’s engagement. We work proactively with our partners to build and maintain their trusted advisor reputation and we work very hard to protect our partners and their customer relationships. We designed our partner program to reward partners that can build a growing base of customers, drive incremental value and invest resources in technical training. And we believe that this combined effort and community approach will deliver a remarkable experience to our customers and a community that put people and their business at the heart of ours. And we are all on a journey, every one of us. Each and every one of us. 

04:45
Jaco
The journey that will often be disrupted, testing our operational resilience like with Covid-19 now, what history has showed us is that during a global crisis is an opportunity for innovation. Some of the most innovative companies and technologies were born during these challenging times and in times of extreme uncertainty and volatility and demand. Digital technology can certainly make sense of this multitude of data quickly and optimally, and we remain focused on our destination to help redefine human potential as a component of automation and the small part that we playing as an element eight community is to provide intuitive technologies designed to propel businesses and livelihoods to new heights. So we are open for business and the team is ready to help. Our website will be live shortly which will mark our official digital launch. And training will be available at our office in four ways. 

05:38
Jaco
And this is really our journey. We hope to have you on board and join us in making the world a better place. So reach out to us and let us know how we can help. And we thank you for your time again today, Lenny, thank you for prompting the slides. I’m going to hand over to Lenny if you have any questions. Guys, just ladies and gentlemen, if you have any questions, just pop it over in the q a panel and let us know your thoughts. And we’ll be able to answer those questions hopefully during the time that we have. And if we don’t, we do run out of time. We’ll make sure to answer those questions with you afterwards. So thank you very much. Thanks, Lenny. 

06:14
Lenny
Perfect. Thanks, Jaco. Good afternoon, everybody. I think before I’m going to start with the technical introduction into the ignition ScaDA, I think we’ve got a poll that we’re going to run just quickly here. And as Jaco said, we’re sitting in a very challenging situation now with lockdown and Covid-19 and I think we want to get from our audience that we have on the call here. What do you think is going to be your biggest operational and business challenge that you foresee over the next three months or if lockdown is a little bit longer after lockdown has actually ended? What do you can foresee from those five questions that we’ve got there or answers that we’ve got there, would you foresee as going to be your biggest challenge? So if you can quickly have a vote on the poll, it would be appreciated. 

07:01
Lenny
And I think we’re going to also have the results of the poll up live as it’s coming in. So as soon as those are ready, we can quickly have a look at the results of the poll as well. Okay. I think while that’s coming in and while people are still making their choices, let me start with a few slides on the ignition scalar, what it is and what it does and then we’ll take it from there. All right, now, what is ignition? Well, if I put ignition in a box to say that ignition is an HMR and a ScADA kind of solution or software package that you install and download, I wouldn’t make it any justice because it’s much more than just an HMR or a ScADA in accents. 

07:52
Lenny
It is an industrial application server that you deploy and it’s got very strong modular capability that you can enable to do way more than just HMI and ScADA functionality. It is designed from the ground up. It’s very simple to get started with. I’m actually going to build a project from scratch showing you guys how easy it is, how user friendly it is. And you can literally use it for the smallest application that you can think of, but it can scale very good to even the largest multi site implementation that you might require from a project. Now, it is server based software that you install. It is web based and it is installed and deployed using those web technologies. And it’s also managed via a web page. 

08:40
Lenny
So you create all your connections and all your configuration is done via web pages and it’s also web launched. So anybody that’s got access to the website can download the designers to start designing their applications. They can launch their applications that are already done in runtime. So it’s a complete web based and web managed solution that you install on your server side. And using that web based technologies, you will then go and connect to plcs and you could connect to databases to get and store data. And the nice thing about that is that can live on any platform because we’re using these web based technologies. And yes, it does provide the standard HMI and ScaDa capabilities just in a much better and a much simpler way to actually deploy your solutions. So why is it so special? 

09:33
Lenny
There’s five point key points that I want to iterate here on the slide quickly. The first thing is that, yes, it’s got a very simple, yet extremely flexible licensing model and I’ll go through the licensing in the next slide. And 0234 and five there is all about how quickly and easily it is to get ignition up and running. It’s super easy to install. You can very quickly design and develop on the solution. It’s extremely scalable and very easy to get going. And I hope in my demo that I’m going to do a little bit later. You’ll notice all of these four points getting realized when I actually build out a solution from scratch. Now, based on the licensing, it’s quite a disruptive license model that they have. It’s something that’s quite different from what we’ve seen in the industry so far. 

10:23
Lenny
And the reason for that is that licenses are sold by the server. So you activate your server, or in ignition terms, they call it a gateway. And if you license that gateway with whatever modules you need for your particular application, you get unlimited free web launch clients. You can add and connect to as many tags from your scadus or from your plcs as you need to. And you can have as many designers concurrently open and designing on projects. So there’s no concept of having a consignment or a development license. You don’t have to pay for extra tags if you need to load extra tags, giving that your hardware can support the extra load that you need to put on the system. But it is quite a disruptive and easy and hassle free licensing model that they’ve adopted on the ease of deployment. 

11:12
Lenny
Well, you can get it up and running in three minutes and I’m going to test that. I’m actually going to install it and we see if I can get it up and running in less than three minutes. And another great thing is that it is fully cross platform. So I can run it on my Windows box, I can run it on my Mac OS or on a Linux little raspberry PI or on a full on Linux box in that case as well. And I’m going to test that as well. I’m going to see if I can install it on a Windows device and see if I can launch it from my Mac that I’ve got running as well. So just a little bit more on the actual platform in the industrial application server that you deploy. 

11:50
Lenny
So ignition becomes that platform that obviously sits on top of your operating system and has got standard functionality and modules that you can deploy, web services, database connections, you can go and configure it in a redundant component. And on top of that, there’s core modules that you can then deploy on it. Two, that I want to just quickly highlight. There is the vision module that will be the ScADA solution or the ScADA application module. They also launched a brand new perspective module that is now full on web based ScADA development. And I’m going to build something out a little bit later in the demo. But all of these modules you can then plug onto the already industrial application server that you’ve deployed. There’s also third party modules where you now can extend this layer to give you mes functionality. 

12:40
Lenny
So there’s modules for OEE, track and trace, SPC, et cetera. And we can also now start playing into the industrial Internet of things with ignition. And they do it very well. And that is with the MQTT modules that we’ve got. And obviously on top of that is then where you will go and create your applications and your SCADA solutions on top of that. So it truly becomes this one universal platform and that platform then becomes what we call a little bit of a communication hub. So you can hook up ERPs devices, scanners, limb systems, data that’s in the cloud, you can connect it to OPC, UA service, et cetera, connect to PLCs, and it really becomes this internal and universal communication hub where you can get all your real time information together to build whatever application is required. 

13:35
Lenny
So in essence, the basic flow of an ignition solution is plain and simple. When you install the server, you install what we call a gateway. Now that gateway will be used to launch your designer, all your applications and everything sits on top of that designer or on that gateway, and you’ll also use that to obviously build your applications. And that applications can be a multitude of different applications, all ranging from ScaDA, meh, IoT application, even custom and mobile applications that we can build on top of the gateway. But the gateway is the point where everything is stored, all your applications lives, and everything will run and function of the gateway. Just a little bit of some typical architectures on how you would deploy an ignition solution. Now we mentioned that it is extremely flexible and it can scale quite well. 

14:29
Lenny
In this case, this is the simplest kind of installation that you can do where you have one ignition server where you install the gateway component and that will then connect to your different plcs and your databases, and then obviously have your applications being launched either by web clients or web designers on your mobile devices. You can also have this hosted in the cloud. So the ignition server can be hosted in the cloud and you can also have your databases in the cloud, so it can be a cloud hosted solution as well. And obviously then you can have access from it anywhere where you have access to your cloud infrastructure. When you do need redundancy, obviously you can extend your already application that you’ve got and you can add a redundant server. 

15:18
Lenny
So if you have critical applications that require uptime, we can also introduce the concept of a redundant server. Now if you need to scale the solution to a little bit of a bigger application, obviously you can go and split it out into a multi architectural kind of component. So you’ll notice that I’ve got two gateways there. And all that those gateways do is they serve the iOS, so they are the communication to the PLC devices and that’s all that is licensed and configured from a module perspective on those gateways. On the front end is all the application servers and they will host all the applications. And via load balancing, make sure that we can handle all the requests of all the different clients that need to concurrently open up solutions and applications. So it’s extremely flexible in the architecture that you can deploy. 

16:09
Lenny
You can start really small and you can build it out and scale it out as per your requirements grow from that application. A little bit of a distributed architecture. We can also deploy that. So if we do have RTUs and PlCs that’s remotely, we might not have a lan or a wan communicating to those remote Rtus. It can be field devices that’s out in the field. All we might have is a cellular network or a serial or a satellite link. We can utilize the MQTT concept, pushing the data to an MQTT broker and then we can still get all of that data into our central ignition server by means of loading an MQTT engine module on top of that to get all of that data from all of these remote places. So truly you can start small. 

17:03
Lenny
You can start from the smallest application and bridge it out with the individual modules and components that we have available to us. I’m going to demonstrate a little bit of this MQtt in the demo that I’m going to do as well. So you guys can see how quick and easy it is to actually get that up and running. All right, I think it’s time for the last live demo. So let’s get the ball. Let’s chuck it to the Tesla window. Let’s hope it doesn’t break. Okay, so let’s go to my vm that I’ve got here. So I’ve got a vm that I’m running. Please. Yuck on the guys. Just stop me if you don’t see my virtual server that I’m running. And what I’m going to do is I’m going to actually go and install ignition from scratch. 

17:56
Lenny
Now, it said I can do it in under three minutes. So let’s get the timer up and running here and let’s see if I can actually install it under that. So I’m going to hit the installer button. It’s going to launch the splash screen for me to start the installation process. So there we go. It’s going to guide me through a very simple installation wizard. It’s going to give me the folder where I can actually install it. I can decide do I want a typical installation or if I really want to go and customize what modules I want to install. I can do a custom install and you can go and select and unselect whatever modules you do not require. I’m going to leave most of these modules as is and just do a typical kind of installation that we can go. 

18:42
Lenny
So I’m busy installing it. It’s going quite quick. You can see the progress. Brother is progressing nicely. And I’m about 50 seconds into the installation process, so it’s looking good for making my three minute timer that I’ve set for myself. So it’s busy installing the windows service there, and I think after this, all it’s going to do is create the uninstaller package. There we go. And I should be almost done installing the solution. So there we go. It’s installed. There’s one thing that I still have to do, though, and that is I need to commission my gateway so it will pop up with the gateway settings. I’m just going to minimize it. So we’ve got the timer still in there and we’re going to just quickly go and do a commissioning process on this gateway. 

19:31
Lenny
It’s going to ask me to accept the license agreement. I’m going to accept that. And next of all, it’s going to ask me for a password for my gateway. I’m very quickly going to type in a password that I won’t forget during this demo. A simple one. It’s not very secure, but I don’t want to do any spelling mistakes later on. And obviously you can also specify which port this gateway should start up. So I’m going to hit that. That’s all I have to do to get the gateway up and running. Hit the start gateway process and it will just finalize the gateway set up. It will start up the gateway service, which is a Windows service that runs in the back end. And after that, I should have an up and running ignition system. 

20:13
Lenny
It’s still looking good for making the three minutes timer that I’ve got there. So this should complete very soon, momentarily. And after that I actually will have an up and running ignition system. So there we go. So I got it. Two minutes, 20 seconds. I’ve got an up and running ignition system, so very simple to install and get going from that perspective. All right, so it’s got a little bit of fast start components here. So I can either quickly go and set up a connection to a device or connect to a database or activate a license. But I’m just going to go to the home page of my gateway. Remember, as I said, everything is managed through the web interface of the gateway. So this is where I’ll go download my designers, I’ll download my clients, et cetera. 

21:00
Lenny
There’s also some quite nifty guides here to have a quick start guide with all the documentation that’s required. There’s also a link to the inductive university. So it’s quite a valid point to go and visit the inductive university. There’s more like 600 videos that shows you how to implement and we’ve got a little bit of a promotion that we’re running that we’ll discuss later in this as well. But we’re engineers. So I would like to go and configure a connection to potentially a database or a PLC. So let’s go over to the configuration tab again, typing in my username and password that I’ve configured this gateway with. Sign in and I can now connect and configure the gateway. Now I want you to notice one thing. 

21:48
Lenny
As you’ll notice at the top here, I’m in a trial mode and currently I’ve got a two hour timer that runs with it. So I didn’t have to install a consignment license or a development license. This system is fully operational. All the modules that’s in it is fully operational in a two hour trial. When the two hour trial runs out, you simply reset it and you get going again. So you can go and develop an entire project just by using the trial node that comes with the solution. So that’s great. All right, so let’s go and create a connection to a database. So I’ve got a Microsoft SQL database installed so I’m going to select that. But we also can connect to Maria, dB, MySql, Oracle or postgres. So I’m going to connect to the MySQL server database instance that I’ve got running. 

22:36
Lenny
I’m going to give it just a nice name. So this is my Microsoft SQL database. I’m running it on the default instance, but you can obviously change the instance name or the port number if you’ve changed that from a SQL perspective at the bottom here, I’m just going to supply it with my SQL account credentials to actually log on to that database. I’m just going to quickly type in the username and password there. And I’ve already got a database, it’s called ignition. So I’m going to go and connect to that database and that is it. Hit the create new database connection option here and there. I’ve got a valid connection to my database so I’ve just set up a database connection utilizing the web tool. Next, let’s quickly connect to a PLC. 

23:24
Lenny
So at the bottom here you’ll notice underneath the UA section ignition is also a full on OPC UA server. I can go and connect to devices. So hit the new create new device option here. They do have a bunch of standard drivers for all the major players. So you’ll notice there’s connections to the Alan Bradley range of PLCs. I can connect to a DMP three driver, Modbus, Omaron PLCs, Siemens PlCs. There’s a generic TCP and UDP driver. What I’m going to do is I’m going to utilize just for the demo here, the simulator. So they also have a built in simulator that I can utilize to just get my project up and running. So I’m just going to call this is my simulator and I’m going to create this device right here. 

24:11
Lenny
Now, the nice thing about the simulator is that they’ve created some simple programs that I can load just to get up and running. So there’s SLC program, a generic program with some random values, and there’s a dairy simulator. So I’m going to load that dairy simulator into my simulator. And you’ll notice that you can obviously go and play with the values and change the past and create your own simulator. So you don’t really have to connect to a real PLC just to get standards and stuff developed. So I’m going to save this program. And there I go. So I’ve created a connection to my PlC. I’ve created a connection to my database, all from the web managed solution. All right, now, we said that this is cross platform. So I’ve installed it here on my Microsoft server VM that I’m running. 

25:03
Lenny
But let’s see if I can actually connect to this from my Mac. So I’ve got my Mac up and running here. I’m going to launch the designer that I’ve already downloaded, and I’m going to see if I can add the designer that’s on my network. So it’s busy looking for any gateways that’s on my network. So it found this new box. Notice that it found that it’s running on a Windows operating system. So I can just add this gateway and I can start developing on this, a new application. So obviously it’s going to open up the designer for me. I’m going to log in utilizing my same credentials that I’ve created on the gateway. And obviously because it’s a keen install, there will be no projects that’s currently built. So I’m going to create a brand new project. 

25:53
Lenny
I’m going to give it a name. All right, I can go and select my database that I’ve created as a default database for you. To utilize. If I had a parent project, would I would like to maybe inherit some properties or graphics? I could have linked it to a parent project, but currently I don’t have a parent project from that perspective. They do have some sample projects or some projects to start off with. So I’m going to use this vision navigation project here just to get me going with some predefined screens and navigation. Hit that. It’s going to actually go and create the project. It’s going to start the different modules that’s required and the designer should start up in a second. So that’s the designer very intuitive place to go and configure and connect. 

26:43
Lenny
So you’ll notice that I’ve got my project properties here at the top where I can now physically go and build screens. And I’ve got my tag browser section here at the bottom. Now I’ve already created a link to that PLC or that simulator so I can actually go and browse all of the devices that I’ve connected to. So it’s open up this OPC browser here. And if I expand that, you’ll notice under the devices section here that there’s that simulated Plc. And if I look in the overview, there’s a bunch of motors and a palletizer and some sensors that’s already in there. If I expand the motor, you’ll notice that motor consists of amps that we get or amperature that we get back from the motor, as well as there’s an indication if it’s in hand operating mode or in automatic mode. 

27:29
Lenny
So I would like to create just a little bit of a graphic on these motors that I’ve got already in my PLC. Now what I’m going to do is I’m going to go and create a data type of this motor. So all I have to do is I take the motor structure as it is in the PlC, drag it onto the data type section here. It’s going to ask me do I want to create individual tags or do I actually want to create a UDT for this motor data structure? Obviously I want to create a type because I want to mass instantiate this motor a lot of times. So if I do that, it already created that data type. It’s called motor with the amps and the operating switch on top of that. Let’s quickly edit this. 

28:11
Lenny
So obviously I want to just call this template motor. And what I would be able to do is I would like to automatically populate the addresses to the PLCs based on instantiating the instances of this motor. So I’m going to give it a parameter here. And this parameter I’m going to call my motor number. So this will be my motor number that will replace and I’m going to give it an initial value of one. Now all that I have to do is I have to go to the amps and I have to change the OPC item path which it automatically filled in for me. And all I have to change is this address with my number. So this will now automatically change that. I have to do it for the switch as well. 

28:57
Lenny
So when I instantiate it will automatically go and populate these addresses based on whatever that motor number is. Now also created a database connection. So at the bottom here I can go and enable history on this point. So I can enable the history or to enable history and I can go and select my database connection that I’ve already done, hit the apply button there and hit OK. And now the amperatures will also be historized. Okay, so my data type is done. What I can now do is I can go and create a whole bunch of these motors. So I’m going to create a folder here. I’m going to call that folder my motor folder. And what I’m going to do now is I’m going to use the multi instance wizard to quickly populate a whole bunch of motors for me. 

29:43
Lenny
So it’s going to ask me which data type would I want to use. What is the base tag called for that I’m going to call it motor. I want to go and create eight motors. So I’m going to create a pattern to say one to eight. And I also want to replace my motor number with the patterns. And I also want to replace that with motor one to eight. Hit the ok button. Expand motors. And I should have eight motors. If I expand them, you’ll notice that the values are updating. They’re all referenced to the correct addresses in the PLC and they also started to historize into my database. Now I’m still in the designer mode. 

30:19
Lenny
I have not even put this in a client, but I can already see what the values are and how the values are updating, which is a brilliant feature. I’m going to close this OPC browser here and let’s quickly create a new window here. I’m going to call that window motor the window motor. And let’s see, I can take this amperature here and I can drag it onto the screen and say, okay, show it to me as an led display. Again. I’m in the designer and I can see how all the value updates and change while I’m busy designing and building my application. So that’s great. But obviously I don’t want to go and custom create each and every one of these motors. I would like to create a graphic template for these motors as well. So let’s delete this guy from the screen. 

31:05
Lenny
And at the bottom here I’ve got the option to also not only create windows, but to create graphic templates. So I’m going to create a new template and I’m going to call that template my motor. Hit the create template button and I’ve now got a section to actually go and create that. Let’s do exactly the same. Let’s drag in the led display here. Let’s also drag in a multistate button to show me what the state of my button is. I’m just going to change that to be row based so I can get it nice and at the bottom here, resize it a bit, move the amperes at top. And now all that I have to do is I need to link this to my motor UDT. So I’m going to create a custom property on this graphic template. 

31:50
Lenny
I’m going to add a custom property called motor. And instead of creating the individuals for the amps and the switch, what I’m going to do is I’m going to link it to my already defined motor data type and I’m going to make it a drop target. So what that means is if I drop this motor onto the screen, it will automatically populate it with this particular template that I’ve got. So that’s also quite a nice feature. All I have to do now is I have to link my amps to that property of my motor UDT and on my switch I’ve got two properties here at the bottom, which is the control value that I’m also going to link to my hand operating switch indicator as well as the indicator value. I’m going to link that to my hand indicator as well. Perfect. 

32:42
Lenny
Hit the save button at this point, go back to my motor screen. And now if I drag the motor onto the screen, it will automatically go and populate it with my motor template that I’ve created. So that was quite quick. Let’s add three of these motors, one to one another and let’s save our project. Okay, so I’ve got three motors onto the screen. Let’s see if I can quickly launch this into a client. So I’m very quickly going to go and launch this as a window client. Here. So this will obviously open up the client component. Log into that and I’ve got my client up and running. All right, so one thing that I’ve forgot to do is I need to add a navigation property here to actually browse to my new screen. So let’s quickly go and do that as well. 

33:39
Lenny
So go back to my designer. Let’s go to the navigation section here. On this navigation tab at the top, I can simply go and add a new tab. I’m going to call that my motor tab and I’m going to go and link that to my motor display. Hit. Ok, hit save. And if I go back to my client, it’s already updated. I’ve got that new motor tab at the top here so I can select that and I’ve got all three of my motors. That was quite quick and it’s really updating the client side very quickly as you make changes to your project. Okay, so one thing that I don’t know is I don’t know which motor is which. So let’s quickly fix that in the template. So all I’m going to do here is add a little label at the top. 

34:24
Lenny
And what that label is going to show me is just what motor am I actually looking at? So I’m going to link the label to my motor property. My motor or tag name property of my motor. And potentially let’s just put a little motor indication here that I actually look like I’m actually looking at a motor. Let’s just make that a bit smaller. All right, save again. Go back to the client and it’s already updated with my label at the top and the motor icon at the top. I’ve also historized some of my pvs. So let’s quickly add something to the screen here at the bottom. Let’s add a chart. So I’m going to add a very simple chart at the bottom here as well as a tag picker. So I can just go and pick my different tags that I’ve got as well. 

35:15
Lenny
So I’m going to add the tag browser tree to my screen as well. Again, hit the save button and off we go. It’s already updated on the client so I can now browse all of my tags. And obviously I’ve historized the amps. So if I select the amps and drag it onto the trend, you’ll notice it started to historize and I can see all of the amperages going onto the screen. So that was really quick. How to get it up and going, how to get it up and running from that perspective and how to create a very quick application, normal HMI kind of ScADa application from the get go. What I want to introduce now is a little bit of a different concept. I think everybody on the call is aware of the whole buzzword about digital transformation, et cetera. 

36:10
Lenny
And I think the whole world about converging it and ot everybody thinks that it should be this massive project and it should be something that’s going to be very expensive. And what I want to challenge here today is I think that bridging the itot gap can be as small and as simple as possible. And all you have to do is just get it started and get it going. So what I’m going to do quickly here is let’s close my client here, let’s save here, and let’s close my application. Right. What I’m going to do is I’m going to go back to my gateway and I’m going to install an additional module here. So currently you’ll notice all the modules that I’ve got up and running and installed, and all of them are running on the trial version, I’m going to install an additional module. 

36:59
Lenny
And what I’m going to install is, you remember in the architecture slide, I spoke about a distributed architecture solution. So I’m going to go and install this MQTT engine that is a third party module from a company called Cirruslink. And I’m going to go and install that onto my gateway as well. So I’m just going to accept the agreement here for that installation, install the certificate, and off we go. So I’ve got now my MQTT engine module also connected and connected. So all I have to do now is I need to connect my mqtt engine to a broker. Now I’ve got a broker running in the cloud, so there’s no connection from my little field device that I’ve got going to the cloud. And all I have to do is obviously just populate the URL here with my cloud settings. 

37:52
Lenny
So I’m just going to quickly type in this IP address here, which is my IP address for my MQtT broker up in the cloud. All right, hit the save changes button and it is connected to that. Perfect. So I’ve got a new module up and running. I also have another application running on a Raspberry PI. I’m going to relaunch my application quickly here and you’ll notice that I’ve got a new section under my tag section, which will now be populated by my MqtT engine. So let’s just have a quickly look at that. So if I expand my all providers here, there’s an automatic section here with my MQtT engine and currently there’s no tags that’s being populated by any MQtT field device that I’ve got connected to my broker. Let’s quickly reset my little raspberry PI device. 

38:55
Lenny
So I’m running ignition edge on a Raspberry PI. It’s also configured with the MQTT module. So I’m just going to quickly log in here as well. So you’ll notice at the bottom here it’s also got a MQTT module configured. And I’m going to go and reset the trial here so I can get the solution up and running as well. All right, so there it is in trial mode. What I should now be seeing, if I refresh my providers here, that I should see edge nodes popping up underneath my mqtt engine. If I expand that, I can now see all the tags that’s coming in from my field device via my MQtT broker and there’s all the tags already automatically being created for me. I did not have to create these tags. 

39:41
Lenny
It’s utilizing the MQTT protocol with sparkluck B to actually populate these tags for me automatically. All right, so now what I can do is I can make this available to someone potentially on the web. So what I’m going to do now is I’m going to go and use the perspective module inside of ignition, not the vision module anymore. Now as we said, perspective module is there for you to create web based applications. So what I’m going to do is I’m going to create a quick new web page view here. We can call it view. I’m just going to create the stock standard naming convention here. I’m also going to create two little widgets. Now, the first widget that I’m going to do is going to be a tank that I’m going to go and create. 

40:25
Lenny
And the next widget that I want to go and create is going to be a thermometer. So I’m going to quickly create that widget as well. So I’m going to create two widgets. And the whole purpose of what I’m trying to do here is I’m trying to create a dashboard for an end user that he can go and populate himself. So in this widget number one, let’s put on a tank, a cylindrical tank on here, and let’s link the tank now to my little raspberry PI device that I’ve got. So I’m going to link this to my Mqtt engine, to my edge node at the bottom here. I’m going to drill down, and I’ve got somewhere here a tank level. There we go. So I’m going to use that tank level to animate my tank. Perfect. I’ve got my tank level animated. 

41:11
Lenny
Let’s go to the second widget on this widget. Let’s very simply put thermometer on here, and let’s configure that to look at my temperature range that I’m also getting from that little raspberry PI field device. Now, remember, that little field device is not on my network. It’s utilizing a cellular communication or an Internet connection to get the data up and down to the cloud. All right, so let’s hit the ply there. And there we go. So there I’ve got my two widgets. What I’m going to do on the main view here is I’m going to go and add a dashboard to this. So what I want to do, able to do is I want to give the end user the capability to create his own. 

42:16
Jaco
Seems like Lenny quickly try and get them back online, folks. 

42:54
Lenny
Let’s launch this in my actual browser that we’ve got. So I’m going to launch this in my browser. 

42:59
Jaco
All right, Lenny. Sorry, do you mind resharing your screen? We lost you for about two minutes there. 

43:05
Lenny
Okay. 

43:07
Jaco
If you can maybe retrace your steps for the last 40 seconds or so, please. 

43:12
Lenny
Okay, cool, perfect. Everybody back. Can you see it again? 

43:16
Jaco
Yeah, it’s back online. Thanks. 

43:17
Lenny
All right, so just to retract, what I’ve done is I’ve created a dashboard. And on the dashboard, I would like users to create their own dashboards right there when they open up the website. So I’ve created these two widgets, a tank widget and a thermometer widget. And all I’ve done is I’ve told the dashboard that I can actually go and allow people to create these two widgets onto their dashboards. And I’ve created a website link to the dashboard component. So when I now launch this component here, it will now launch it in my browser. So let’s launch this session here. So now it’s in my browser. So it’s full on HTML five compiled. It’s in my browser. 

44:01
Lenny
If I click on the little edit button here to edit my dashboard, I can now go and create a little widget here, and I can say okay, you know what? On that part of the dashboard, please add the tank. And on this little part of the dashboard, please go and add my temperature, and I can go and customize this as I want. And obviously, the amount of widgets that you make available to someone is the amount of widgets and dashboard components that it can actually go and create on the screen. So as I said, I think creating this and making data available for everybody in your organization based on live plc dates or key critical KPIs that they need to see is really simple. And it’s not so hard to really embrace the whole digital transformation strategy that you might have in your organization. 

44:50
Lenny
And obviously, you can go back into edit mode and you can delete your panel here, and you can resize this panel here and go crazy and create your dashboard for whatever flavor you wake up in the morning. But the point is that we can get this data and information into people’s hand that need to see it. Especially now in the lockdown situation, people might want to see data from their plants real time KPIs, and we can make these available right there and therefore then based on a website and have that information into their fingertips. All right. I know that was quite a lot. That was quite a mouthful. Clarice, I don’t know if you have the results of the poll that we can quickly show on the. Oh, there we go. Ok, so I agree with that sentiment. 

45:44
Lenny
Financially, I think we’re all a little bit worse off than were and especially in the manufacturing sector. But I really hope that you guys can see that we’ve got a solution that can probably fit any financial constraints that we might have. And we can start very small and grow the solution as we need and require and really get these digital transformation strategies and stuff that everybody’s been talking about, but not really doing, really get them going in the smallest matter that we’ve got and then scale them out to that. Jaco, I don’t know if you’ve got any points on the poll. 

46:24
Jaco
Yeah, Lenny? I think it definitely speaks to what we’ve been hearing in the market for the last little while. And I think as we approach, well, we’re now in phase two of lockdown. I think as we approach and phase through the seeing out, I think that the tail end of Covid-19 is definitely going to influence us all a little bit longer than what we have anticipated. But I think now is the ideal time for a few things. I think definitely, first of all is learning and education and just making sure that we are all aware of what is available, what the capabilities are and what we can do, it’s a perfect opportunity for that. 

46:59
Jaco
And then secondly, around the sort of financial constraints that we may face, I think it’s definitely an opportunity for businesses to understand how they double down on some of these costs and get the highest efficiency out of their systems and out of their production. And secondly, also understand the role that digital is going to play going forward. I think if one thing that we’ve picked up from Covid-19 is the ability to enable remote workers and a remote workforce, and be able to operate within the constraints that we have. So definitely good opportunities to reevaluate what we have and what is available. And yeah, we’re definitely there to help with that. I do see there’s a few questions that have come through, if we can maybe hit into that. I can maybe pick up the first one, Lenny, that was from JP. 

47:46
Jaco
JP, thank you for sending across your question. It was around the trial mode that we have available as part of the ignition that you’ve been working from, and JP wanted to know if there are any restrictions, and I can maybe pick that up. So the trial mode that is downloadable, obviously at no charge, will allow you to connect to an unlimited number of data tags, plCs, databases, devices. You can really create any kind of industrial application, you can instantly launch an unlimited number of clients. The only limitation is that, or restriction, if I want to call it that, is that while you’re in trial mode, that the ignition gateway will time out every 2 hours, and you would need to be required to restart the trial, which you can do an unlimited number of times. 

48:32
Jaco
So hopefully that answers your question on that one, JP. And the second question, Lenny, that JP had was how do you create multiple line text box? So you can almost like wrap text, if I can use that term, that you can refer to as an Microsoft office term. How do you wrap text in a multiple text line? 

48:58
Lenny
I’ll play with that one, Jaco. I’ll create a little project for JP and I’ll send him that answer now to create a multi line text box on that. Yes, perfect. I’ll get back to JP on that one. Cool. Any other questions that came in? 

49:14
Jaco
Yeah, I see. There was a question from Johan, how scalable is the integration of mobile devices? 

49:24
Lenny
So if you utilize the perspective module has a mobile app that you can download and you can obviously connect into your gateway. Obviously you need to have a connection available from your mobile device to that gateway, but the same applies. You can have as many mobile device connections and you can use the same perspective project that you’ve built and you can utilize that and open it up for the app. Now, they also have quite clever ways of doing that. They can see what the resolution of the app is that you open up so you can add different context to different resolutions being on your browser or on your app device. So you can make stuff smaller and bigger and hide different components depending on what device you’re on. 

50:13
Lenny
But the same unlimited restriction applies with regards to the mobile and you utilize your same perspective project that you’ve created for that. 

50:23
Jaco
Perfect. Another two questions, one from Durwin Oxley. Hi Durwin, I don’t understand the start small and grow concept. If pricing is for the server and it can have as many tags, et cetera, how can ignition be applied to a small process or machine competitively? 

50:42
Lenny
Okay, so there’s two components there. So ignition has as another component. You’ll notice in the demo I’ve connected to a separate install which was a little gateway that I’ve installed on a raspberry PI. Now that was what they called ignition edge. Now ignition Edge is a solution catered for pure HMI kind of solutions. Obviously it’s got its limitations on scripting functionality, et cetera. But you can start small on implementing that as a pure HMI and obviously grow that to communicate back to your full on ignition server that you’ve got now. You’re right, yes, if you license a gateway or a server, you can go and connect as many clients and tags as you want. But remember I showed a list of all the different modules that you could load to a gateway. 

51:36
Lenny
So there’s modules that you can log and create recipe management into a SQL database. They call it the SQL bridge module. There’s a reporting module, there’s an alarming module. So it’s not necessarily that you have to go and implement and start off with all of those different modules and you can really start small just by a very simple HMI Scadus project and later on add these different modules to your solution. Obviously if your plant grow from a tag perspective and you notice that your server hardware can’t handle the amount of tags anymore that you pull, then obviously you need to put down a new additional hardware and that new hardware device needs to get licensed. 

52:17
Lenny
But from start small growing, it’s more about the type of application that you’re going to enroll and growing the functionality that potentially with the MQTT modules as I showed as well to really leverage that and create a full fledged IoT solution as well. At the end of the day. 

52:34
Jaco
Cool, thanks Lehigh. Durban had an additional question to that follow up on that. Are the modules priced according to size? 

52:43
Lenny
No, it’s priced according to buy. Just an example. If you buy the reporting module, you pay for the functionality to create reports, not necessarily the amount of reports that you can create. 

52:58
Jaco
Exactly. Good questions there. Thanks Durban. Question? 

53:04
Lenny
Sorry Jaco, just on that, all the modules and the pricing for the modules are publicly available. It’s available on inductive automation’s website. After the call I’m sure we’ll send the link to you guys with all the necessary websites, et cetera. But all the different pricing for all the different modules is available publicly on their website and you guys are more welcome to go and build your own solution and see what the pricing works out with. Obviously if you need a rand price, we’re more than willing to help to get you guys that architecture scoped and get you a real price based on your architecture or your solution. 

53:39
Jaco
Perfect. Thanks Lenny. And I think Jaco’s question as well, Jaco are the modules example, perspective and visual additional to the server license cost and perhaps go for it? 

53:52
Lenny
It can or it cannot be. So you’ll notice if you go to the website with the pricing, they’ve got a standard kind of solution like ignition standard. Now ignition standard comes with the vision module and they also have ignition pro which come with the ignition or the perspective module. But you can always add the perspective module to the standard ignition solution. So it’s very flexible from that perspective on how you want to mix and match the different modules to get you a solution that you need at the end of the day. 

54:22
Jaco
Awesome. Thank you. Then I suppose it’s more of a comment than a question, but Andres, thank you. Thanks for joining us and thank you for sending across your comment. Andree said, I’m amazed at the different systems being developed. Proprietary, not necessary for open market use. Maybe you should start marketing harder to EPCM type companies so they don’t invent this over and over when this is already available from flow, especially the cloud application service et. Very very good point and I think that reusability aspect will definitely have a massive cost saving for those companies. So it’s really good comment there. Thanks for that sending that across, Andrees, and it’ll be nice to be able to meet with you after lockdown again. But thanks for that comment and very good statement. 

55:05
Jaco
I don’t see any other questions that have popped up, so hopefully that’s answered everybody’s questions for now. Obviously it doesn’t end the discussion. If you do have any additional questions or things that you think about afterwards, please reach out to us. We’ll share the details of what we have been through today, and maybe just as a follow up in terms of what’s next. We’ve mentioned inductive university a few times. Lenny mentioned it right in the beginning. It is an incredible opportunity for you to learn. As Lenny mentioned, there’s over 600 videos, 20 courses available that you can work through and complete in your own time, in the comfort of your own study. 

55:46
Jaco
Hopefully, if you have, or as many of us are in bedrooms and dining room tables, it is 100% free online and just a really good opportunity for you to get better acquainted with ignition and the solution. We’re also running a little bit of a promotion at the moment. As you progress and complete your credentials on inductive university and share your success with us, we will make available a few Uber Eats vouchers. Uber Eats is of course running. I think they’re doing essential items. And if you’re familiar with us and our office, chocolate is definitely an essential item. And I know there is a whole host of things that you can order from Uber Eats. So if you complete those courses, share your success with us on LinkedIn. Unfortunately, not beer and wine, Derwin. 

56:34
Jaco
Sadly, we’ll make sure that we get you an Uber Eats voucher for doing so. We’ll share the details of that as well. And then the next session that we’re going to host online is next week, Wednesday. We’re going to very similar today, take a little bit of a deeper look at the canary historian that we’re going to actually co host with Jeff all the way from the US with Canary. And that’ll also be a very nice sort of basic introduction to Canary. Again, very similar to what we’ve done with ignition today. So we’ll be sure to share the recording with you, as well as all the sort of appropriate links that you may need that we have spoken about. 

57:16
Jaco
And again, if you have any other questions that you sort of ponder about over the weekend, over the next little while, please let us know and we’ll make sure to reach out to you and give you those answers. And as I say that, another question from Jaco. How are the upgrade to software managed service packs, new versions? Is there annual license fee? I suppose the question is, how do you handle any sort of additional incremental software updates, such as upgrades and version upgrades or dot upgrades? And the second part is there annual license fee? 

57:55
Lenny
So yes, Jaco there is annual license fee. So obviously for support and getting your new versions there is annual license fee. On top of that. What they do is they try and bring out a new version about every four weeks, and if you go and look at the download section on the ignition website, they actually publish all their nightly builds. From a development perspective, every night you can get a new nightly build for the next version. Obviously you’re not going to run that in production please, but to test and to see what the new features are and the new capabilities that’s coming out in the new version, you can almost, as the developers finalize that piece of the code and have their nightly build, you can already start playing with it and see what the new functionality is. 

58:42
Lenny
So that’s quite a nice feature where you can get a little bit of insight to what’s actually coming before the actual relaunch of the version. And I tried to do it about every four to six weeks that there’s a new full on version that you can download and get up and running. Upgrading is very simple. It’s almost quicker than I’ve done the full install here in the demo today, so it literally takes you about three or four minutes to get it upgraded and up and running again. 

59:10
Jaco
Perfect. Thanks Jaco. Hopefully that answers your question and then harad low thanks for your question harad. Can you please share your email addresses or can I make contact on information at element eight CRZ? You can absolutely send us a note on information at element eight CRZ, but we’ll make sure to share Lenny and our individual email addresses with you as well, and we’ll reach out to you to give you that information. Thanks for that. So that brings us up to 02:00 good timing Lenny. Thank you very much for taking us through that and thank you again everybody for joining us. Hopefully that was valuable and informative to you. And please stay safe during phase two of lockdown and let’s use the time productively and we’ll chat again over the next few days. Thanks very much everyone. 

01:00:00
Lenny
Thanks everybody. Stay safe. 

01:00:02
Jaco
Thank you, cheers, bye.