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| From PLCOpen.org presentation of February 2014 |
One event was the announcement today in Control Engineering - Europe entitled OPC-UA client function blocks for IEC 61131-3. In that announcement was the following excerpt "...adding the OPC UA client functionality in the controller by defining a set of Function Blocks for IEC 61131-3. This specification has just been released, making the controller an intelligent part in the IT communication."
The other announcement is even more significant in my book. It's the release of the a new ControlLogix OPC-UA module made by OLDI. I missed the Rockwell webinar about it yesterday and the information on OLDI's site is sparse, but it obviously sits on the CLX backplane so would seem to have access to at least a single controller's tags and maybe even more.
The latter release will likely pressure other PLC manufacturers to do the same, and then I think the snowball really begins.
3 comments:
High Steve
I recently attende a conference, where Stefan Hoppe, president of opcfoundation of Europe and a Beckhof employee, held a speech. What was very interesting for me, is that According to Hoppe, and he should know, Siemens (and ABB) are the two main drivers in OPC UA. HE said that without them OPC UA would never had happened. I asked why I most cases Siemens themselves did not promote it better and he thought the size and conservatism of the units within Siemens stopped it. However there are some political drive for it in Germany so hopes are high!
It's truly sad that embracing technology like IEC 61131-3 and OPC UA is predominately European. I've watched with resignation for decades as the USA appears to cling to ladder logic as the end all for every PLC task. No serious interest (or knowledge) in OPC UA either.
I called ProSoft a while back to see if they had plans to update their OPC server for their radios to OPC UA. Nope.
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