We are a small printing facility with conveyor line, stacking machines, shipping equipment etc. Most of our equipment is B&R.
We installed Ignition 10 years ago, and to be honest it’s very under-utilized at our plant. We only have seven projects running in it.
It’s very nice SCADA software, but we are rethinking our training strategy and would prefer to teach our electricians/maintenance techs only one software ( B&R AS4.12) rather than two.
We had one project running with VC4, but replaced that with Ignition. Thus we have a bit of VC4 experience and not much Mappview experience - however I just got my first Mappview project running in AS6.3, and really it was not that hard.
Our needs are basic HMI connections, but Ignition does have one SQL connection and it pulling and storing some data - but i think we could develop a solution for that one case. Other than that it’s fairly basic “on, off, reset,” and viewing some setpoints and sensor outputs via OPC/UA.
Any suggestions on the merits of Mappview, VC4, versus Ignition or alternate solutions are appreciated.
I am an SW designer developing hmi, scada, mes from different manufacturers in the market . I developed the application with Ignition, VC4 and mappview. The strategy proposing plc and hmi/scada running on the same machine/plc is only cost-effective but is an absolute loser from a technical point of view, especially for platforms churning out multiple releases of hw and sw every year (I worked with apc2100,3100,910,…AS 2.0,2.74.0,4.2,4.5,4.6,4.9).
This is my professional opinion.
The mapp View editor in AS6 has made huge progress in terms of user-friendliness. I can tell this from my experience conducting training sessions for this tool. A month ago, I trained people using AS6 for the first time, and even those without any prior experience were able to create a simple visualization very quickly.
The advantage of mapp View, from my point of view, is that you can use it both on a single hardware unit (e.g., C80 with PLC and visualization combined) or on two separate devices (e.g., X20 PLC and T50 panel). For a simple machine, I personally wouldn’t use SCADA.
The disadvantage of mapp View could be that if you try to take advantage of all the functionalities it offers, the visualization can become quite complex and require more powerful hardware. So, if you’re designing a visualization for low-cost hardware, you need to take that into account during the architecture phase as well. If you are looking for on, off, reset and viewing some datapoints, this with mappVIew is easy to do for sure.
And last but not least, if you sell your machine to europe. mappView is CRA ready (EU Cyber Resilience Act).
We would upgrade from the x20CP0482 to the x20CP0484-1, to the RAM necessary to run mappView.
Our goal would be to keep the visualization as simple as possible.
I understand that without knowing our full use case it’s hard to say if we will max out - BUT If anyone has comments or insights as to CPU / RAM capacity from their experience that would be appreciated.
A X20CP0484-1 is on the lower end for mapp View. Technically it should be no problem - but resulting performance highly depends on the load of the PLC and the number of data points (OPC-UA) you need for the HMI …
Thanks Christian. For Client I plan to use little Linux NUC’s with touch screen connecting with web browser. We already have them setup with the Java client app to connect to Ignition.
I plan to make a sample project to test performance. Any suggestion for “mid-range” performance?
Servus … I cannot make a real suggestion, just some “advice”
Please keep in mind, that mapp View run’s in the idle time of the PLC!
The X20CP0484-1 does not provide too much processing power, so for reasonable performance of the HMI it is important to not eat up the whole CPU time with the realtime tasks.
Additionally - mapp View connects to the PLC data via OPC-UA. For that reason you should consider how quick / often you want to have OPC-UA check for data changes. For 484 the defaults might be too low (needs to be given a try!). You can configure different sampling rates for OPC-UA within mapp View - best results you usually get, if you adjust the rates to the real needs.
Finally, in later mapp View versions, we also have the possibility to use scripting directly on the client side … so if you need any “HMI logic”, you prop. want to use these scripting capabilities, to reduce the load on the PLC …
thanks, i checked one. But really any suggestion is helpful as my question is fairly open ended and perspective - not really a technical question with a direct answer.
I see the point. You can either select the one reply or make a summary and mark the summary. I think the discussion itself has a lot of good points anyway, so it is helpful as it is.
