Manage Edge Data Like A Pro With Ignition Perspective

00:00
Well, good afternoon, everybody. Thank you very much for joining our webinar today, just a little bit on the webinar series that we’re holding the next few weeks. This is part number one of our webinar series. I’m going to focus on how to get data straight into your hands. But as I mentioned, in the next coming weeks, we’ll have two additional sections in this series so you can see exactly how to get that data out of the plant and straight into your hands to make meaningful and decisions on how to operate your production facility. Thanks again for joining us this afternoon, especially during these times that we have. I’m really glad you guys made the effort to actually join us on this webinar today. With me, I’ve got myself, Lenny, that’s going to drive the webinar and the demo today.

00:47
We also have Clarice Rautenbach from element eight, our marketing manager. Clarice, thanks again for all the effort you’ve put in to get this webinar promoted and get the registrations in. We can actually go and deliver this meaningful content that we’ve got for our channel partners on the call here today. And we also have Jaco Markwat, MD from element eight on the line. And I want to thanks everybody for actually making the time and joining us from a panel perspective as well today. Now, before we get going into the ignition SCAD Ups solution and the little demo that I’ve got prepared here for you today, I just want to very quickly introduce you to element eight now.

01:27
I’m very proud that as of today, we are the authorized distributor of the Ignition SCaDA solution by inductive automation, as well as the Canary Time series historian by Canary Labs, and the flow information platform by Flow software. And we truly, honestly believe that these three components, or these three software packages is an unparalleled solution stack, a best of breed solution stack that we can offer and take to our clients in our current market conditions. The focus that we have here from element eight perspective is completely system integrated, channel focused. So we support our channel. We support our channel by giving them training. We support our channel by giving them support.

02:13
And we really want to help everybody that’s on this call here today to see their potential and to translate that potential in everyday automation projects that they might do inside of their production facilities. So before I get started with my little demo and show you guys how easy it is to get plant data or edge data into your fingertips, I’m just going to very quickly have a few slides just to introduce the ignition SCADA solution. So what is ignition? Well, ignition is what we call a modular industrial server application. Now, yes, you might think, well, it’s just an HMI or SCADA that I just installed, but in essence, you actually install a little bit more than just a ScaDA.

02:59
You install this industrial application server that allows you to create ScADA and HMI’s applications, but it doesn’t stop there from the capability that you can actually deploy. From an admission perspective, it’s been designed from the ground up. It’s very easy to get started with. It’s extremely capable to cater for the smallest implementation that you might have up until the largest or biggest kind of multisite, multi enterprise installation. So in that sense, it really is a good fit for any type of automation project that you might encounter. Now, when you install the software, you install it as server based software, but everything you do and everything that you configure, you do through web based sessions. So ignition is installed and deployed by using these web technologies, and you also manage your solution by the means of the ignition platform’s website.

03:53
And you’ll see some of these web pages and settings that I will go through as I do my demo. So everything is done from a configuration perspective. And you also launch your applications from this website. So all your designer tools and all your client tools that you will actually utilize to build screens and build applications and launch it from an operator perspective will be done through these website launched web pages. Now, you can easily use ignition and the web technologies that it gives us to access plcs and databases. You can connect to them and you can configure them from anywhere, from any platform. And in that sense, it does give you the common HMI scader capability that we need. It just does it in a very better and in a much simpler kind of fashion. So why is it so special?

04:45
What makes ignition so special and disruptive in our current industry? Well, first of all, it really has a very hassle free and very simple licensing model. It’s extremely easy to get installed and to deploy a solution. You can very rapidly develop and multiple people can develop at the same time. It’s extremely flexible and it’s very easy to get going and to get yourself familiarized with all the tools and all the designers to actually build out your application. Now, from a licensing model and a licensing perspective, it’s very simple to actually license your ignition server. Ignition is sold by a server license. So that means you license the actual server that you’re running the product on. And with that, you can have unlimited free web launch clients. You can also have unlimited amount of tags that you can actually host on side of the server.

05:40
And you can also go and configure and connect to unlimited free concurrent designers. So you license the server and pretty much you’ve got free rein on the capability and the amount of data that you can connect to it and the amount of screens you can develop on it and as many concurrent designers can connect to actually work on the same project. From that perspective, it’s extremely simple to get installed. A few weeks ago I did a webinar where I actually installed the product. I got it installed under two minutes and 30 seconds. So you really can get it installed for under three minutes and it runs fully cross platform. So you can install it on your Windows PC or your Mac or your Linux box, and you can actually go and develop and configure across these different platforms that we also might need.

06:29
And I’ll show you that. An example from my situation that I’ve got for the little bit of a demo here. So in essence, when you do, when you deploy, it is when you install the industrial application server. You install that on top of your operating system layer. Now that platform then gives you certain amount of capability. It is an UA client. It allows you to connect to databases. It provides you real time tags from your plcs. So it gives you the platform or core platform layer. And on top of that platform layer is then also the different type of modules that we can enable and disable depending on the different type of applications. So we’ve got our SQL bridge module, we’ve got our tag historian, we’ve got our two visualization clients, which is vision and the ignition perspective module.

07:15
We also have a reporting and alarm notification modules on top of these modules. There’s also companies that create third party modules. So from an MES perspective, if you need to do an OEE or a downtime or a track and trace solution, you can enable those modules on top of your platform. Or if you want to utilize the MQTT protocol from an IIoT perspective, you can enable those modules to extend your platform and on top of your platform. And all the modules is then where you will go and create your user created applications. So your SCADA applications, your hmis, your MES and your IIot application will then live on top of these different modules that we’ve deployed.

07:58
And in essence, what we are doing is we’re creating this one centralized or universal communication platform or communication hub where I can get all my real time signals being OPC based being PLC or driver based. From PLC perspective, if I need to get data from databases or erps or barcode scanners or mobile devices, everything can be configured and connected to create this one universal platform where I can get all my real time calculations and all my real time tags in and I can go and start building my applications on top of that. Now before I go and actually demo a little bit of a project, I just want to very quickly go through the actual workflow or what’s required to actually build an application.

08:44
Now I mentioned a little bit previous in the slides that when you installed the software, you actually install server side software. So what that will do is it will actually install and configure what we call the ignition gateway. So the ignition gateway is the central piece of software that runs on your server side. And when you configure and create applications with your designer, you actually go and connect to the gateway. You’ll design your applications, you will create these applications, you will save these applications back onto the gateway. So the gateway is the central point where all your tags and all your connections and all your applications lives, and you’ll utilize the designer to actually build out these applications. And these applications can obviously range from a whole bunch of different types of applications, mobile, ScaDA, MEs or IoT type of applications.

09:36
Now from a physical architecture perspective, you can deploy ignition in its most simple form, which is a very simple central server managed solution where you would go and install the ignition server with all the modules that you require one single server, and you will connect that to databases or you connect that to your different plcs, create your applications and deliver these applications through your front ends. Now these could be mobile devices, web launch clients, touch panels, and obviously you will also utilize that to design your applications. Now you can move this to the cloud and you can actually have your server and your database residing in the cloud, and then you can have actually access from anywhere to configure and design and launch your applications.

10:25
Ignition themselves don’t offer cloud hosted servers, but nothing stops you from actually spinning up your own vm in the cloud and running your application on cloud hosted architecture. If it’s a very critical application, you might want to go and deploy redundancy. So in this case, I’ve got a secondary ignition server that will be my redundant server with failover capability. So I always have a very good uptime of my application. Now we mentioned that ignition can scale very simple from the smallest application to the more larger and complex kind of applications that you might encounter. Now in this architecture, it just shows you that we can go and from an architectural freedom perspective, go and split out the load if we really have a very big application.

11:15
So I can split out my tags, my real time tags out on its own individual servers, and I can have the visualization or the graphics component live on the front end or the front end gateway. So all my clients that need to see the application, all the load will be distributed by those three servers in the front by means of a load balancer that we can deploy from an IT perspective. So from an architectural freedom perspective, it really is very flexible in the way that we can deploy these architectures. And also very important that we will only license the different module that is required on these different servers. So in the tags and I O server, we probably just need to license the PLC driver that we need to communicate with them.

11:57
And then on the front end side, we will then license and activate all our vision and our front or our visualization modules. Vision or the perspective module. From that perspective, we can also have a very good distributed architecture. So if we potentially have stranded assets out in the field, in this case, we can utilize the MQTT kind of modules to bring those stranded assets out to a central server. And you’ll notice in this example that I’ve got a few field devices running the ignition edge module. There’s some devices that only has the MQTT transmission module installed, but they all go and talk back to a cloud hosted MQTT server. And then my central ignition server can get those tags and data that’s been published to that server to visualize on the visualization perspective.

12:49
So we can really go and build out these more distributed architectures by utilizing it from that perspective. All right, now it’s time for my demo, and it’s going to be a live demo. Probably shouldn’t use this slide of the Tesla demo going a little bit wrong, but let’s go and actually build out a little bit of an example of how easy it is to actually get edge data from my devices. Now, let me just quickly lay the scene here of what I’m actually going to go and demo. So my little scenario that I’ve got, that I’ve built out is the following. So I’ve got a whole bunch of solar plants, and these solar panels and solar plants or solar farms is connected to inverters, obviously. And these inverters has certain data that I would like to get.

13:44
I would like to know what is the kilowatt of what each and every inverter delivers to the grid as well as if there’s any fault codes, what these inverters actually generate. Now on these solar farms, there’s also a weather station. And typically what these weather stations will give us is the temperature, the pressure, the radiance that I get from the sun. Obviously very important factor so that I can determine theoretically what should my kilowatt production actually been. Now normally on these type of sites, these things are connected to a modbus master. And in this case what I’m going to do with my little ignition edge component here, I’m going to go and connect to ignition edge or to these modbus devices to get all of these different signals out.

14:29
Now if you’re going to look on the inductive automation’s website, you go to the onboard section. They actually have a whole bunch of different devices. If I can just quickly show you guys that in my browser here, they’ve got a whole bunch of different devices that we can actually go and look at to actually run ignition edge directly. So in this case, there’s some cellular gateways that we can use. There’s some embedded pcs that I can actually, that comes with ignition edge already pre configured and installed. There’s some gateways and embedded pcs. There’s even some plcs that run the ignition gateway already installed on it. And then obviously from a touch or HMI perspective, there’s some rugged touch panels and touch panel and field devices and hmis that I can run my ignition edge device on top of.

15:15
Just want to quickly show you guys the options are there, but not necessarily that you cannot run it on any other device. These devices have been certified with the ignition onboard program, but for sure you can go and run it in my example. What I’ve got here is a little Raspberry PI device, and I’ll show you guys that a little bit later as I do the demo. All right, now what I’m going to utilize is I’m going to utilize the MQTT transmitter module to transmit these data points into the cloud. I’ve got a cloud hosted MQTT server that will be my broker for all of this data. And then on the corporate side or in the enterprise side, I’m going to also go and subscribe to this data sitting in my MQTT broker.

16:01
In this case, I’m going to install the MQTT engine module on top of my central server and I’m going to build out a very simple perspective or HTML five rendered visualization client little dashboard project from that perspective. So in a nutshell, that is what I’m going to cover in the next few minutes here in the demo. And let’s see how well we can connect to these different devices. Okay, so I’m going to just stop the presentation here for a minute and just to show you guys my little device that I am going to connect it to. Let me just bring up my phone here. Let’s camera. Let’s just turn it around. So here I am. Hi guys. Let’s see how well this live demo is going to go.

16:55
So just to show you guys here in the office there, I’ve got a very simple little raspberry PI that I’m going to run my nttth device on. And that little Raspberry PI is going to push out the data to my MTT broker and I’m going to subscribe to that broker to get my data out. Let’s just get myself out of the way here and let’s get cracking with the demo. Now, we said that everything is installed as server side software and we configure everything by means of a gateway. So I’m going to go and connect to the gateway running on my little raspberry PI and it’s as easy as typing in the web address of that device and then the default port of where your ignition gateway is installed.

17:45
In this case, I’m creating it through my browser and I’m logging into the gateway now that’s running on the PI device. You’ll notice that I am running ignition edge, which is the HMI and panel kind of solution. And also I can enable the MQTT transmigal module to extend the capability there. Currently my trials expired. I can at any point reset the trial and I’ve got 2 hours again running. That’s also very nice. I don’t have to have a license to run and configure. I can utilize the trial mode or the trial license to get my device up and on. Right. So from our little architecture diagram that I had, you guys remember that I need to communicate to my Modbus device that’s on the field. So obviously I need to connect my little edge here to the Modbus master that’s sitting in the field.

18:38
So what I’m going to do is I’m going to go to my device connections at the bottom here. Currently I only have a little simulator connected to it, but I’m going to go and create a new device connection and I’m actually going to connect to that Modbus TCP device. But you can notice that I can also connect to Alan Bradley plcs, siemens plcs and then obviously my Modbus and TCP or RT that I’m encountering. So I’m going to connect to my Modbus. It’s going to be Modbus TCP, hit the connect the next button here. I’m going to give it a nice name. So this will be my solar plant and all I need to do is give it the hostname or the IP address of where my Modbus server is running. It’s going to use the default Modbus port which is port 502.

19:27
And let’s go and create this new device here. So started up disconnecting, trying to connect and there we go. I’ve got a successful connected Modbus device here right now. As you know, Modbus is not browsable. It’s not a browsable standard that I can actually just browse the tags and see all the values of the different tags that’s available in that Modbus server. But ignition’s got a very good feature, very nice feature where I can actually go and create aliases for these modback tags. So I’m going to create a few aliases here and I’m going to add a new alias row. Now my first data that’s in my Modbus device is all the data that’s related to the weather station. So I’m going to give it a prefix of Met for my Met station. And I’ve got eight tags that I’ve got available for me.

20:21
These range from temperatures to borgmetic pressures to the irradiance and the air temperature, et cetera. And they start at Modbus address number one. Now very nice thing is that I could have selected if it was a coil or a discrete input or the different holding and input registers depending on the different sizes. In this case it’s the normal 40,001 kind of holding register, normal in 16 kind of scenario. So I’m going to select that and I’m going to go and create these registers. Right now. The next one that I’ve got is obviously the actual inverters themselves. So the first row that I’ve got from my inverters would be the active power. So I’m just going to call it inverter kilowatts. I’ve got ten inverters in the solar farm so they’re going to go from one to ten.

21:17
Again it’s the same old holding register but now they start at address number nine. I also have fault signals coming from my inverter. So this will be my inverter faults. Again I’ve got ten inverters so that will go from inverter one to ten. Again normal holding registers and they start at address number 19. Now the last thing that I’ve got from the smart plus device is the actual meter. So that will be all my meter data. I’ve got 14 different meter signals that’s available for me. This includes amps, voltages for the different phases, the wattages, the delivered power, et cetera and they all start at address number 29. Right. So I’ve created this little alias list for myself.

22:10
I’m going to hit the save button here that will now save it and if I’m lucky and I’m going to collect or connect via my quick client here, my OPC quick client and if I browse these devices that I’ve just created from a solar plant, I should be able to browse these tags. So there we go, there’s my net station tags and if I read one of these tags I should get a value. So there we go. It’s about 17 degrees out in the field there and let’s see if I can get some inverter power data in here. So let’s see what inverter number two gives me. It’s quite a lot of kilowatts that an inverter is producing. So with this feature, very nice, I can actually go and create these alias listed for my Modbus tags. Perfect.

22:55
So I’ve got connection to my Modbus device, I’ve created the alias tags. The next thing that I need to do is to push these out with the MQTT protocol to the cloud. Now let’s go look at my modules that I’ve got installed on this device. Currently I don’t have any MQTT modules. You’ll just notice all the standard modules that’s installed. But I can go and very easily go and install that third party module. So I’m going to click here on the install or upgrade a module component here. I’m going to browse to my ignition transmitter file. I’ve already downloaded it a little bit earlier before this demo and I’m going to go and physically install that onto my device. So again, very nice feature. I’m not physically connected to the PI, I’m just connected via its gateway address.

23:50
The module file lives on my computer. So it’s actually now transferring that file from our pc to the device, installing it and getting it ready for me there to run. So obviously it will take probably a little bit of time to get that installed and running. So let’s just give it a gap. And there we go. All right, so there we go. I’ve got my MQTT device or module installed. It will also create additional settings that I can go and configure. And in this case, I’ve got two components here, the history component. So I can select if I want to save some data on the little Raspberry PI itself in case of a network failure. I can create a history set for that.

24:36
And I can also tell it, obviously, I need to tell it to which MQTT broker does it need to send data to in this case, you’ll notice that it’s connected to my cloud hosted environment. And if I look at the transmitter, what it will do is it will create a tag path for me called MqTT tags. And any tag that I put into that folder, it will transmit out to any broker. And obviously any device that’s listening for those tags will be automatically created. All right, so I’m going to disable it for now because I want to enable it and show you guys how it will automatically create the tags for me. Okay, so let’s quickly launch my designer. So I’m going to create a project now on the little PI device. So I’m going to launch the designer.

25:29
What it’s going to do, it’s just going to ask me to log into the PI with my credentials here. You guys all know how secure my devices are. Sorry about that. All right. And this will now obviously launch the designer. So the designer is what I will now use to create my kind of HMI, windows, et cetera, on the little application that I’ve got running on the PI. You’ll notice that currently I’ve got no tags inside of my folder structure. I do have that tag structure that’s been created for my NQTT tags, but I’ve got no tags for the inverters. I’ve got no tags for the meteorological station. But I can actually obviously browse those tags if I browse my devices here.

26:24
There’s my little solar plant, there’s all the med station tags, et cetera, all my meter, all my kilowatt tags and my fault tags. So let’s quickly get these tags into my application, and then I’m pretty much ready to start pushing them out with MqTT. Right? So let’s create a new tag folder here. This will be for my met data. So this will be my meteorological stations data. And let’s drag all my mets tags into that station tag there. Then it will go and create all of the tags and I’ve got the real time values coming through. So I know what the pressure is. I know the radiance from the sun, and I’ve got the temperatures in here as well. Right now for the inverters themselves, I’ve got two tags. I’ve got the kilowatts and I’ve got the fault code.

27:13
But I would like to create a data type of these fault codes as well. So what I’m going to do is I’m going to go and drag my kilowatts here on data types. I’m not going to create the individual tag, but I actually want to create a data type. And this data type will be of type inverter. So let’s give it a nice name. So this is my inverter data type. Currently it has one parameter, which is the kilowatts. But what I would like to do is I want to use this template to mass instantiate all ten of my inverters. So I need some parameter to obviously distinguish these different inverters. In this case, I’m going to create a new parameter. I’m going to call it my inverter number. By default, that will be value number one commit that hit apply.

28:04
And I’ve got my little inverter with its one tag. I can very simple also drag on default tag to there. So let’s drag that onto the inverter data type. It’s going to ask me do I want to add to my type? Do I want to create a new type? In this case, all I want to do is add that type or that tag to my data type here. So I’m going to add that. And let’s just clean up the names again. Obviously, it’s now not hard coded to inverter one anymore. It’s now just the generic kilowatts. Generic false. And let’s just fix the item pass because obviously the item pass will be hard coded to the individual tags themselves. But I would like to change that to the actual inverter number that I’m going to go and configure.

28:47
So let me just do that for the kilowatts as well. And let’s just change this to my inverter number as well. Perfect. So I’ve got my data here that I can now utilize to mass instantiate all my different inverters that I’ve got. So let’s create a nice tag structure here for inverters. So let’s create a new tag. Let’s call that my inverters and what I’m now going to do is I’m going to use the multi instant wizard to go and create all of my different inverters for me. So I’ve got ten inverters. So they will go from one to ten. And I’m also going to replace my inverter number tag with that same type of pattern as well. Change that from one to ten, hit the okay button. And that would have created all ten of the inverters with all the tags.

29:43
And you can notice I’ve got no faults, no codes, but I can see all the different kilowatts that these inverters are generating. Perfect. So I’ve got all my, just maybe give it a little more space that we can see. So I’ve got all my inverter tags, I’ve got my med station tags. The only tags that I’ve got left here is just the tags for my meter, the main meter that’s connected to the grid. So let’s add that as well. And I’m just going to drag the meter data into there as well. Perfect. And there’s all my meter tags inside of there. All right, so perfect. So I’ve got all my tags. Everything is set up. I’ve got them set up to be the Mqtt tags.

30:31
Obviously, if I want them to be pushed to the MqtT broker, I need to embed them underneath this MqtT tag section here. So let’s do that. I’m going to drag them all underneath this MQTT tag structure because when I enable that MqTT transmitter module, it will push them out. And just for some additional data, I’m also going to push out just one of these sign tags as well. So just to show you guys that I can push individual tag as well as the data structure there. So I’m pretty much done with my edge device. I can now actually move over to my enterprise solution. Right. So I’m going to open up a secondary tag here on my browser, and this time I’m going to connect to the gateway of my enterprise solution. Right. Notice this is running the full ignition.

31:27
It’s not ignition edge again. The trial expired. Not a problem. I’m going to sign in and enable the trial again. And I’ve got another 2 hours to play with. So that’s great. From this perspective. Now all I have to do on this enterprise solution is I need to connect this enterprise to my MQTT broker. So again, yes, as you might have thought, I’ve got a whole bunch of modules already installed, but I do not have the MqTT module. So let me go and upgrade or install that. I’m going to go and select my MqTT engine module this time because I now need to collect the tags and create the tags and I’m going to install that onto my enterprise solution. Perfect. It’s going to actually go and install it. There we go. I’ve got my MqTT engine again.

32:22
I’ve got some settings here at the bottom and all I need to do is obviously link that to my cloud hosted instance or my cloud hosted broker and it’s going to go and obviously it knows all of these different namespaces. I’m going to utilize the spark plug b namespace or protocol and that will then automatically create my tags for me. The only other thing that I would like to do on my enterprise solution is connected to a database so that I can write the data. So currently I’ve got no database connections whatsoever. I’m going to go and create a new Microsoft SQL database. Let’s just call it my MSQL database. It’s running on the default configuration.

33:07
So default instance, I don’t have to change that, just give it the username and password that I need to connect to so quickly, type that in, retype it, and then the last thing I need to do is obviously give my database a name. So in this case this will be my ignition database that I’ve got created. Perfect. Hit the create new button and there I’ve go. I’ve got a valid database connection that I can actually now store this data that I’m getting from my edge device. Perfect. So I think this configuration is set up. It’s done. Let’s launch the designer for my enterprise solution. In this case you’ll notice that let’s quickly log in here again. It’s going to ask me to log in with my credentials and it will list me all my projects that I’ve got that I can connect to.

34:14
Now you’ll notice that I’ve got currently no projects. So blank, blank solution that I’ve got now. I know my boss told me that I need to get this actually done and dusted by means of the perspective module. So everything must be web based and web in a web solution. But I actually have no clue even where to start. So I’ve never worked with perspective. I’ve done a few vision stuff, but I don’t know about the new module so that’s not a problem. There’s a great website that inductive automation has, and that is what they call the inductive automation exchange. So if I go to inductiveautomation.com exchange, I can actually go and browse great resources that people on the community has published. So I’m going to accept the terms of the exchange.

35:07
And at the bottom here, you can notice that I can go and browse for all different types of projects. So if I want to go and look at some perspective views that people have created, there’s a nice ad hoc trend chart that somebody has built and I can actually download this and I can actually use it, but I need an entire project. So let’s go back and what I’m going to do here is I want to have entire project. So let’s see if there’s any projects. This looks good. There’s a covert tracking project. Someone watched this video on YouTube. In ten years from now, go look at Covid-19 some interesting stuff that happened for us in this day of age. But any case, here’s the entire perspective dashboard. So I can download this project and I actually can go and load it.

35:59
So let’s go and create this project on this enterprise solution of myself. So I’m going to go to the projects tag here. This time I’m going to import a project and I’m going to browse to this project that I’ve already downloaded. So there’s the project itself, dashboard project. I’m going to import that, give it a name, obviously. So this is my solar dashboard and let’s import that. And there we go. I’ve got a sample project. The only thing I have to do with this project is let’s just edit it. I need to connect it to my database so that I can obviously store data. So the default database, I’m just going to select my Microsoft SQL database and I’m going to select that. Perfect. Okay, so now I’ve got a project. So let’s launch my solar edition again, or my solar enterprise designer.

36:56
I just need to log into there. And now I will have the option to actually select this project, my solar dashboard project, and let’s open it up into my little designer here. Okay, so you can see it’s loading all the modules. It’s getting all the modules and everything running. So there I’ve got a sample project. If I look under perspective, there’s a whole bunch of pages and pop ups and widgets that’s already been created for me. So luckily I don’t have to do all of that. If I look at my tags here, I’ve got no tags underneath here. If I look at my MQTT engine, there’s no data types and there’s no tags from my edge device. Okay, perfect. All right, so I’m going to resize this a bit and I’m going to open up the tags here in my edge device.

38:00
So obviously I would like to have all of these tags automatically populate here when I enable that NCT module. So let’s go to the raspberry PI’s gateway. Remember, I disabled it. So what I’m going to do, I’m very quickly going to go and enable this. I’m going to hit the save change button here and let’s have a look. So I would like to get all of these tags populate inside here. There’s a refresh. So let’s see if I expand that. There’s the edge, there’s the pie, there’s all the inverters and my sign tag. And it also generated the data type, the inverter data type for me. So every time I do this, it amazed me how quickly and how easy it is to actually push data all the way from my edge into my enterprise solution.

38:54
It really is very simple and very cool to do it with the Sparkluck b protocol from the MQTT perspective. Perfect. So I’ve got my tags now. Now I need to obviously create a dashboard so I can visualize these tags. I know nothing about this perspective project, so I’m not even going to delve into the design here. All I’m going to do is I’m actually going to launch this project. So I’m going to go and launch my perspective project here. Now, this demo project that they’ve created is actually amazing. And the reason why I say that is that I can do everything from the front end. I don’t have to go and create anything in there. So even the tables that’s required in my database to create this, it will create it from the front end.

39:44
I can actually, from my browser here, create a dashboard. So let’s call that my solar dashboard. I can say, do I want it fixed or do I want it to stretch when I resize? I would like to have it fixed. When I resize, I can also go and create. So let’s just add the breakpoint there if I want to go and create mobile responsive designs so I can design it for certain resolutions, et cetera. So if I look at my widgets here, I can design it for anything below 600 pixels. The layout should be x and everything above that, the layout should be y. So let’s add some widgets on the screen here. Let’s add a gauge. Let’s add a trend here as well. So I can go and add a trend, or I can add a weather station data on there.

40:44
I can actually go and edit these to actually look at the tags that I’ve just created in my project. So let’s make this a bit bigger. Browse for the tags here. So underneath my MTT tag, I’ve got my edge nodes here. Let’s look at my temperature, potentially. So let’s look at the meter data. Let’s look at, sorry, my med station. Let’s look at the temperature there. I know that’s tag number one or two for giving my temperature. There we go. And I can actually design this entire solution right here in this front end from a mobile perspective, which I think is absolutely great. So there’s a whole bunch of default stuff that’s already been created here, like just if I want a numeric display. So let’s animate this to look at one of my inverters, kilowatts from a tag perspective here.

41:44
So let’s browse that inverters. Sorry, inverter number one, let’s look at the kilowatts there. And there I go. So I can get all of the data that is required. I can save this. And now I have an up and running little dashboard here. Let’s do the following. When it is from zero to 600, let’s move the weather station to the bottom here, because I have less real estate. And when it’s 600, I’m going to leave it there. So when it’s bigger than that, it’s perfect. So when I resize it on my mobile device, I can actually see how that works from that perspective. So I’m on my dashboard, I’ve got enough real estate here, so it will fill up the whole screen. So let’s get my phone here back into action on this device here.

42:44
And what I’m going to do is I’m just very quickly going to create a QR code for us so I can actually browse my project here. So this is just going to be very quickly. All right, that’s the port of my gateway. Let me lock the phone. Now, I’ve already downloaded the ignition app, the perspective app for mobile. If I open that up, currently I’ve got no applications. You’d see I’ve got no projects there, but I can very simple, add a project. Now, I can either scan a QR code or I can search the gateway. Let’s scan a code here. A little bit of inception, but let’s point that there’s my little dashboard project. Let’s launch that again. It’s going to ask me to sign in. So let’s sign that in and let’s do that. If I can start correctly. Sorry, guys, live demos.

43:56
And there we go. Now, notice because my resolution is smaller than the one that they are that I’ve got here, it would have go and chose the other layout or the other kind of solution. So that’s great that I can actually design for these different applications that we have from a mobile perspective. All right, perfect. Now, the last thing that I want to show you guys before we end off here today is that obviously if my connection dies from my edge device, I would like to keep the data right. And you’ll remember that when I’ve configured my little edge device here that I had the capability to create this history store on my device itself. So let’s do the following. I’m going to go and add historization to this sign tag that I’ve got here.

44:53
So let’s enable history and let’s store it into my SQL database here. Let’s apply. And that will now start storing my data. Let’s create a very simple vision screen here. That’s going to be just one screen. I can actually close this. So let’s just do this. This is my history demo, part of the demo. And let’s add a very simple chart to the screen. There’s an easy chart. And let’s just add the tag picker as well to the screen so I can actually go and add the tag to my screen here. All right, so let’s put this in live mode and let me add my tag here to the screen. So my sign tag. And there we go. We’re starting to historize that sign tag. So that’s busy historizing. It’s getting its data, et cetera. Now let’s have a look at this tag currently.

45:57
It’s good. It’s busy updating, so it will historize. But what happens now if I actually go and pull the network connection on the pie? So let’s get the phone back here. Let’s quickly get the video out. Sorry you have to look at my face again. But anyway, let’s go to the pie. And what I’m going to do, I’m actually destroying everything here. I’m just going to pull the network connection to the pipe. All right, so I’ve pulled the network connection to the pipe, so let’s move this away. What I expect to happen is this float tag. You’ll notice that the data is not updating anymore, but it should go and fault. Okay, so there we’ve got the connection lost for the gateway. So realize that the connection is down.

46:50
It will also start giving me a bad tag or a bad data on the sign tag. It’s going to take some time, so probably takes about a minute for the system to realize that tag is not down and it’s dead. So when I. There we go. So I got the fault indication here that it is dead. So what I’m expecting on the sine wave is I don’t think I’m going to get all the data back because it had to realize that data point is down before we get comms again. So I think went down. Let’s see if I can get a timestamp of when we last had an update. Sorry, I’m just going to make this a bit bigger. So 233. So it’s about been a minute or so that it’s been down.

47:43
So let’s just give it another few seconds here and then what I’ll do is I’ll actually reconnect the pie here. So let’s give it a few seconds. Let’s see. That’s probably enough. It’s about a minute and a half that this thing has been unplugged. So destroying everything. Let’s plug it back again. Okay, there we go. Network activity is back on the PI. Let’s see what’s happened here. So we still, oh, the connection is restored. There we go. We’ve got tag data and let’s see what happens here if I refresh my trend. So there we go. So you notice I’ve got a little bit of a gap, but it actually folded in very nicely. And I’ve got data all the way from 34 ish all the way. So for a minute there, that was down.

48:40
It actually did store the data in my cache and it’s busy starting pushing that out again. So that’s great that it has that on store capability from that perspective. Perfect. Well, guys, I really want to thank you for attending the webinar today. And I really hope that you guys saw and that you see how easy it is to get going and to configure an ignition solution to actually connect to a device to get the data out and actually having these edge devices push data to an enterprise solution where you can actually go and create mobile device applications to visualize your data a little bit of what’s happening next week.

49:28
Next week we’re going to do series or part number two of our webinar, and that’s now utilizing the Canary Time series historian to historize these tags and to get great data that we can utilize for analysis from a historical perspective. Also, I would like to encourage you guys to sign up with the inductive automation go through the inductive university. We are having a little bit of a promotion during lockdown where we have a little bit of uber Eats vouchers for you guys. If you succeeded with your certification and posted on LinkedIn, we will support that and we have the chance to win an Uber Eats voucher until the end of May. So please keep on look out for those emails for our next webinar happening next week.

50:12
And I really want to thank you guys again for attending this webinar and please stay safe until next week. Cheers.