How do you go from serial comms to serious SCADA without downtime or compromise?

Based in Cincinnati, Ohio, Varland Plating has provided high quality, precision barrel-plated finishes to their customers since 1946. Varland manually performed plating operations until the early 1990s. Then automated systems improved turnaround times and product quality. More recently, the company saw the advanced capabilities of Opto 22's groov products—smaller equipment footprint, Ethernet, data visibility, and more—and entered a new era of industrial automation.

In this case study, find out how Varland Plating was able to bring a 30-year-old automation system into the future without downtime or compromising their SCADA goals.

Learn how all the pieces of digital transformation come together to add another level of data connectivity and security to your projects.

Get Enterprise WiFi and several other updates in the latest free firmware download of groov RIO.

If you have been getting some friction from your IT department about connecting any of the groov RIO family to your corporate WiFi network, this firmware update is for you!

Just like the groov EPIC firmware update 3 weeks ago, we have added WPA-2 Enterprise WiFi connectivity to the groov RIO MM1, MM2 and EMU (Energy Monitoring Unit).

This enterprise WiFi configuration complements the existing LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) authentication options, which have been part of the RIO for a long time.

Join Opto 22 and several industry experts at the first annual OT SCADA CON event in Houston.

Dive into the world of operational technology and supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems with industry experts and fellow enthusiasts. Opto 22 is a proud sponsor of a first-of-its-kind SCADA event taking place in Houston July 25–26, 2024: OT SCADA CON.

Don't miss out on the opportunity to expand your knowledge and grow your professional network. It promises to be the perfect chance to connect, learn, and network in person.

OT SCADA CON is for controls people, maintenance staff, technicians, and sales professionals to learn all about operational technology and the world of SCADA.

Two recent IntegrateLive! workshops on open source and interoperable manufacturing systems are now available to watch on demand.

With a promise to revolutionize your approach to information management, the IntegrateLive! team hosted a two-part webinar series focused on solving information management challenges in the manufacturing industry. 

The PI System, once popular in the industrial automation space, was acquired a few years ago by Aveva. Since this change, there's been a bit of turmoil in the market, causing former PI enthusiasts to look for other ways to acquire and manage their manufacturing data—without being locked in to a specific vendor.

This IL webinar offers new open source and cybersecure solutions...with a live build to show you how. They invited IL community members from Software Toolbox, Inc., Canary, Flow Software Inc., and even brought some groov hardware from Opto 22 to demonstrate.

Now you can watch both webinars here in the OptoBlog. 

Premium Factory Training classes provide hands-on instruction for choosing the best programming options for your control applications.

Looking for a reason to attend groov EPIC Premium Factory Training at Opto 22 headquarters? Are your projects requiring technology that can do much more than a PLC?

The monthly in-person training sessions offered at Opto 22 headquarters help you expand your skill set and find easier ways to meet your current application challenges. The team of Opto 22 instructors are committed to helping each student succeed—no matter your years of experience, skill level, range of interests or goals.

Learn system components and configuration, networking capabilities, diagnostics, troubleshooting, and communication methods that you can apply to your own industrial automation application. You might just build a complete solution before you leave!

At the conclusion of each class, students are encouraged to share their feedback with the training staff. Hear what this month's students had to say about their groov EPIC training experience. Then register to join us for the next class!

Register to attend an Inductive Automation Solution Partner Webinar—presented by Inductive Automation, Cirrus Link Solutions, Sepasoft, Opto 22, and 4IR Solutions.

Digital Transformation is a multi-layered process that requires data and connectivity on every level. Each level of connectivity presents its own challenges and complexities, but you can definitely achieve Digital Transformation when you have the right lineup of solutions.

In this one-hour webinar, you'll see how to build a scalable system for SCADA, MES, IIoT, and Digital Transformation, step by step. Experts from Inductive Automation, Cirrus Link Solutions, Sepasoft, Opto 22, and 4IR Solutions will explain how their respective software and hardware components fit together to create a seamless automation ecosystem within an Ignition Hub and Spoke Architecture.

Discover how groov View, a simple, user-friendly HMI building tool, makes responsive web design easy.

I’ve had the line “Don’t it always seem to go, you don’t know what you’ve got till it's gone” from Joni Mitchell’s 1970 hit Big Yellow Taxi rolling around in my head the past few weeks.

I've been working on building web pages for a personal project I will use on my PC and my smartphone, so they must be responsive.

Because I’ve been working with groov View for so long, I’d forgotten just how really, really hard it is to use standard web design tools to build responsive web pages with graphical elements. There is so much HTML and CSS development required to get a single webpage to display nicely on both a PC-sized screen and a smartphone-sized screen (and everything in between).

With groov View, you don’t have to write a single line of code—it's all just drag and drop!

Join Opto 22 and our technology partner Inductive Automation at the 7x24 Data Center event.

Is your facility mission-critical, with reliability needed 7x24? Then we hope to see you at the 7x24 Data Center Conference—happening next week in Orlando, Florida, June 9-12, 2024. 

This conference is designed for anyone involved with 7×24 infrastructures: IT, data center, disaster recovery, cyber security and network/telecommunication managers, computer technologists, facility or building managers, supervisors and engineers.

Read about the features, enhancements, and various fixes you'll get in the groov EPIC 3.6 firmware release.

You'll see some really amazing updates this year. Meanwhile, while it's exciting to be working on new hardware and software, we also know that regular updates that address some "pebble in the shoe" discomfort are just as important. Our 3.6.0 firmware release adds a few new features and takes out a few pebbles for some nice quality-of-life improvements.

Let’s do a quick unpacking of this new EPIC firmware release.