Machine-to-Machine Communication

… is the automated exchange of information between planning systems, production machines and measuring devices without any human involvement. Thus, processes become faster and more efficient.

But what does this have to do with OPC UA?

Very simple. OPC UA (Unified Architecture) is a machine-to-machine protocol. It enables data exchange, independent of the operating system and manufacturer.

With OPC UA, the standard for machine communication, data can be used very specifically in configured applications in the Simplifier.

OPC UA at the Simplifier

An OPC UA connector is created in the Simplifier in just a few steps. To define the connector shell, the specific data must be specified.

The endpoint address and the endpoint port are required. The endpoint address is the IPv4 address of the OPC UA server and the endpoint port is the port of the OPC UA server.

You can define the timeout duration in milliseconds, seconds or minutes in the timeout units.

The type of OPC UA operations your connector can or should perform, can be determined with the permissions. There are 7 modes, namely:

  • Read
  • Write
  • Browse
  • Read History
  • Write History
  • Monitoring
  • Call

The connector shell is already defined with this information, but requires connector calls to know what to do.

For the connector call BROWSE, you have to specify the input parameters “operationType” and “nodeId” (consisting of two parameters: Identifier and NamespaceIndex). You have also to define operationTarget, returnSet and optionally filterSettings.

As output parameter you can specify a “/” with the data type “String” to get all values back. If you only want to get back selected output parameters, use the following Syntax:

operationResult/[0]/browseResult/children/nodes/

The data type is dependent on the parameter that you want to output.

For the input and output parameters for READ and WRITE connector calls, please check out our Simplifier documentation.

In the following video you can also take a look at how to create the OPC UA connector and integrate it into your application.

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