Multiple X20's How to integrate

Ask Questions
1

Hello,

Our manufacturing facility has 30+ B&R X20 PLC’s. I would like feedback on the best way to integrate these so that the desired data can be viewed in one location.

Thanks

2

Hi @chdavis

Welcome to the Community!

I think that this question is a little broad and so in order to help, we’ll need some more information about your goals. What does “integrating data” mean to you? Do you want to:

*Create a dashboard that shows machine performance metrics?
*Create a single control panel that controls all of the PLCs with one button push?
*Integrate with a third-party cloud provider (e.g. AWS)?

In addition to the end result, there’s also the question of communication. There are different ways to communicate data between the devices. Do these devices need to communicate with each other, or just to some main dashboard/cloud instance?

Here are a couple of ideas that may or may not fit your use case:

  1. A single PC running mappView. The PC can talk to all of the X20 PLCs via OPC UA. The mappView visualization on the “dashboard” PC aggregates all of the collected data and displays it.
  2. The new X20 Edge slides onto an X20 rack and allows you to write your own program(s) for data collection.
3

I have some catching up to do since I am unfamilar with B&R PLC’s. It sounds like mappView may be the solution. Id like to develop a plant overview dashboard with tabs that would allow drilling down to look at specific equipment data. All PLC’s would communicate with one server. It would also be beneficial to pull desired tags to start a trend. Coming from primarily using Aveva will I have similar capabilites with B&R’s IDE? Thanks for your response.

4

Happy to help! Do you have access to the source code for the PLCs? I’m not familiar with Aveva, but B&R’s IDE (Automation Studio) is used for programming every aspect of a B&R system (control logic, HMI, safety, etc.). However, it will be most useful to you if you have the original projects that are running on the PLCs.

Without the original source code, you can see some information about the variables used, and you may be able to create some sort of dashboard with that data. But it would be tricky because you won’t be able to see how the data is used in the original program. I think the best-case scenario involves editing the existing PLC software to add in a data collection and export program, or at least standardizing the variables you need to access so that your dashboard looks at the same data for every PLC.