"MatrikonOPC connectivity helped us to automatically configure the gauges for the next production run, thereby reducing the operator workload and possible chances for errors. The people at the plant are very happy."
Control Systems Engineer, Major Manufacturing Company
A major manufacturing company needed to transfer manufacturing data from their plant in Detroit, Michigan to a process data storage system in St. Paul, Minnesota. The Control Systems Engineering Group chose OPC technology as the communication medium.
The plant housed a NDC Pro.Net system for gauging material properties, including diagnostic and recipe information. The data from each scan by the NDC Pro.Net had to be stored in a plant-level data collection system, an Intellution iFIX HMI using Intellution’s Classic Historian. Additionally, the company wanted to store the same data in a process data storage system located in St. Paul, Minnesota. The data would be used to display crossweb and machine direction variations and trending. To make the NDC Pro.Net data available, MatrikonOPC’s Server for NDC Pro.Net was configured. This enabled any OPC-compliant client application to read and write to the NDC Pro.Net.
Instead of using the OPC client that comes with Intellution’s iFIX HMI, the company opted for a more robust solution and integrated MatrikonOPC’s Client for Intellution iFIX. The MatrikonOPC client provided a more reliable solution, eliminating the need to re-boot the Intellution iFIX server node whenever the system would arbitrarily stop updating values. Testing of connections was done using MatrikonOPC Explorer, an OPC client used to test and configure any OPC connection.
The process data storage system in St. Paul was already equipped with an OPC client. To test the connection betwee