Three new partners, a palletizer on an Allen-Bradley PLC, and secure remote access to your legacy PLCs on demand.

If you're heading to the Ignition Community Conference next week, block out Wednesday morning at 9:00 a.m. The ACME Dynamite factory we brought to Automate has grown since May, and ICC is your chance to see it live.

Quick refresher: ACME is a fictional dynamite plant built by real automation companies to answer a practical question: what happens when you pick the best tool for each layer instead of buying one vendor's whole stack?

Two lines batch and discharge product following ISA-88. Line 1 runs a well-tuned loop, Line 2 is deliberately untuned, and the trends show you what good tuning is worth. Everything on the screen is live. Go look: op22.co/acme.

Since our earlier post, we've added three partners and three new pieces of plant. You'll want to check it out.

A palletizer running on an Allen-Bradley PLC

The new palletizer cell runs on a CompactLogix 5380. Vlad Romanov, with Joltek, built the application, and we left the PLC right where a real plant would leave it, in charge of the machine.

A groov RIO running Ignition Edge pulls data off that PLC over OPC UA and publishes MQTT Sparkplug data to the broker using Cirrus Link’s MQTT Transmission module. Open the Palletizer page, and you'll see cases at the infeed, cumulative case count, cases per hour over the trailing 60 minutes, three staging slots filling as cases arrive, the servo hoist stepping through its layers, and the number of empty pallets left in the magazine. The PLC program didn't change.

That's the brownfield story on one screen. Your controls keep the machine running, and the data still gets where it needs to go.

Remote access, one port at a time

Every plant has this problem: a machine builder needs access to their equipment to troubleshoot, and your choices are a standing VPN into your network or a costly service call.

But the all-new Remote Access page shows another way. The groov RIO in the new palletizer cell runs an OpenVPN client, and each path to the PLC rides that one tunnel as its own conduit: EtherNet/IP on 44818 for Studio 5000, OPC UA on 4840, and the controller's web page on 8080.

You open a conduit when someone needs it and close it when they're done, one at a time. While a conduit is closed, nothing on that port is reachable. Engineering, the machine vendor, and Joltek each get only the conduit they need, and you can watch them turn green and red on the page.

The screen doing that work in Ignition uses Avadine's Opto 22 Integration Module. It controls the RIO's OpenVPN connection and port redirects via the groov APIs, so whoever grants access does so from Ignition rather than logging into the device.

Adding new assets that nobody was watching

We put our building HVAC units on the demo, too. Real units, on the first floor of Opto 22 headquarters in Temecula, California. A groov RIO instruments them and publishes its data over MQTT to a groov EPIC.

Check out the Utilities pages, where that equipment is ours too: building power, two air compressors, air dryer dew point, utility room conditions, and a live camera pointed at the assets in the room.

None of it is simulated. When you watch a compressor cycle on that screen, a compressor in Temecula is cycling. We run our own plant on what we're showing you.

The Architecture page follows the same idea. Filter by HVAC, Utilities, Dynamite, Palletizer, or the Allen-Bradley access path, and you trace just that one system from field device to cloud.

Who does what

The demo works because eight companies each brought the thing they're best at, and because they all agree on open standards.

• Opto 22 runs the process. groov EPIC executes the ISA-88 batch in CODESYS on both lines, and groov EPIC and groov RIO connect what's already in the plant over OPC UA, Modbus TCP, and EtherNet/IP, then publish it with MQTT Sparkplug. The RIO also carries secure remote access. 

• Cirrus Link moves the data. Chariot is the MQTT broker; MQTT Transmission publishes tags from edge devices, and MQTT Engine subscribes to them and delivers them to Ignition. It's all Sparkplug, so values are published on change, and whoever needs them subscribes.

• Inductive Automation ties it together. Ignition is the SCADA and development platform: visualization, alarms, and history, with Ignition Edge out at the machines. 

• Sepasoft adds MES on top of Ignition. Their Batch Procedure module handles the ISA-88 recipes and batch records, SepaIQ analyzes how each batch actually ran, and ISA-95 connects the plant floor to the business systems.

• 4IR Solutions runs the cloud. Hosting, databases, backups, security, and secure connectivity on their FactoryStack platform.

• Joltek brought the palletizer, along with the plant-side perspective of an independent integrator.

• Avadine wrote the third-party Ignition module that controls the OpenVPN connection and port redirects on groov devices, turning remote access into something you can manage securely from Ignition.

• Kanoa brings a full CMMS: work order generation, spare parts inventory, and the whole maintenance side of the house. Work orders are generated from live machine data rather than a calendar, and an operator can request maintenance directly from their screen. They're showing condition-based monitoring at their booth at ICC. 

Nobody owns the whole stack. Swap a layer or scale a layer, and the rest keeps running.

Close the Gaps, Wednesday, September 23, at 9:00 a.m.

Opto 22’s Benson Hougland and Garrick Reichert present "Close the Gaps: Connect any asset to Ignition with Opto 22's groov EPIC & RIO" on Wednesday, September 23, from 9:00 to 9:45 a.m. in the Gateway Theater.

ICC runs from September 22 to 24 at the SAFE Credit Union Convention Center in Sacramento. If you aren’t registered, get your tickets now!

Or see it before you get there

Open the demo at op22.co/acme, then find us at ICC, and we'll walk you through the rest.

Can't make it to Sacramento? Talk to an Opto 22 engineer, and we'll start from where you are.