Ignition Perspective Module: The Plant Floor in Your Pocket

Perspective unlocks the power of your mobile device to open up a new world of possibilities for your industrial applications. Harness the full power of your mobile device’s GPS, accelerometer, camera, barcode scanner, touch gestures, and other sensors to create the next generation of smart industrial applications.

Transcript: 

00:06
Travis Cox: The Perspective Module is the next-generation visualization system for industrial applications. Optimized specifically for mobile devices. Perspective puts the power of your plant floor in the palm of your hand by empowering you to create beautiful, mobile-responsive industrial applications that run natively on any mobile device and web browser. The Perspective Module has full HMI and SCADA capabilities and marks the beginning of truly mobile-optimized, touch-responsive, easily accessible applications from monitoring, control, analysis, and data gathering in industrial systems. The Perspective Module adds views, styles, and session events to Ignition, ultimately providing the ability to build and launch powerful applications using any web browser. Perspective is designed for the web and works with any modern device that supports HTML5 and ES6. You can access a Perspective session through a simple URL in your web browser.

01:00
Travis Cox: Perspective has native apps for iOS and Android. The native app unlocks the power of your mobile device to open up a new world of possibilities for industrial applications. You can harness the full power of your mobile device's GPS, accelerometer, camera, barcode scanner, touch gestures, and other sensors to create the next generation of smart industrial applications. Perspective also works well on desktops. The Perspective workstation acts as both a launcher and a desktop wrapper for Perspective sessions. Perspective workstation allows you to run your Perspective applications as first-class desktop applications designed for HMIs, panel PCs, and dedicated workstations. Perspective Workstation has built-in features to run in windowed mode and full screen kiosk mode, eliminating any distractions from the underlying operating system. There are also features to manage applications running on dedicated workstations with multiple monitors. You can instantly deploy changes to runtimes without having to relaunch or touch each client station. The module can interface with just about every part of Ignition, from accessing tags to performing SQL queries and databases, interfacing with REST APIs, and leveraging Ignition's extensive scripting functions.

02:12
Travis Cox: Views and containers are an integral part of the Perspective design experience because they work together to create your HMI screens, which are the windows into your application. The view is the primary unit of design, and the container provides a way of laying out and organizing child components within a view. A view can be mounted in a page as a primary screen. It can also be a template, popup, or a doc view. Perspective takes object oriented design to the next level. Any view can be parameterized, even the entire project. You can even specify drop configuration to drag tags and UDTs onto Perspective views to automatically create the template instance. It is easier than ever to build dynamic applications utilizing pre-built objects of industrial assets. Streamline your development process with robust design components and features that enable you to design for mobile, desktop, TV, and touch-panel screens all at the same time.

03:06
Travis Cox: With new, responsive optimized container types, you can easily customize the user experience. Ignition Perspective is totally responsive. It automatically adapts to fit screens of any size, giving you a personalized view into your unique processes. Optimize for whatever device you're using. The Perspective Module comes with a host of built-in components that you can use in your project. Components are what give you flexibility in designing HMI and SCADA screens that reflect your company's design and your site's layout. Components are the widgets you deal with every day: buttons, text areas, drop-down charts, gauges, linear displays, and so on. This includes Perspective symbols that are predefined industrial graphics, such as the valve, vessel, motor, pump, and sensor. Symbols are easy to configure using the built-in properties. You can import any SVG or choose from nearly 4000 ready-made images available with the Symbol Factory Module. You can also easily make the graphics come to life through animations.

04:02
Travis Cox: There are many ways to manipulate and arrange components when working in the designer. A large number of navigation options exist in the Perspective Module. You can decide which views are mounted to which URLs and which views are docked for navigation and status purposes. From there, you can decide how a user navigates, whether you use navigation, trees, buttons, tabs, or menu bars. You are in control of the user experience, especially what the user has access to. Perspective provides powerful binding functions to bring displays to life. A binding is a mechanism that allows a property on a component to change based on a change to a value elsewhere in Ignition. For example, with binding the liquid level displayed in a tank graphic can be bound to the tag representing the liquid level in an actual tank. Perspective support seven types of bindings: Properties to link to other properties in the screen, Tags directly or indirectly linked to tags in Ignition, Expressions to link to calculations using Ignition's powerful expression language, Expression Structure to link to multiple sources at the same time and combine as JSON result, Databases to link to SQL queries, Tag Historian to link to data from Ignition's Tag Historian Module, and HTTP to link directly to REST APIs.

05:13
Travis Cox: Perspective buy-ins give you the power to transform the data. They offer a chance to alter the value return from a binding. For example, you can bind a property to integer value and use a transform to map the numerical value to a particular color. All from the same interface. Perspective gives you the power to style your project in just about any way and easily edit styles across your entire project instantly. You can use powerful and flexible CSS Styles to change the appearance and position of anything in your application. By combining styles into themes, you'll be able to apply and edit styles across multiple applications in an instant. Perspective employs multi-touch technology to work with touchpad and touchscreen interfaces, allowing users to utilize commonly used gestures such as pinching, panning, zooming, and scrolling.

06:02
Travis Cox: Achieve advanced functionality in Perspective using the built-in Python scripting engine. The Python scripting language is well supported, powerful, and easy to learn and read, so your projects are easy to maintain. With scripting, you can respond to an event handler such as a button click, customize components through extension functions, customize data and bindings with transforms, perform client startup, shutdown, timer, and keystroke scripts, send messages, and a lot more. Perspective's approach to security covers a wide array of topics, including authentication, authorization, and permission modeling, and transparent layer security. You can use single sign-on with existing corporate credentials to get access to all of your assigned accounts and applications in one place. Clients launched from the Perspective Module are secured using cutting-edge encryption technologies and communication protocols to provide the most secure web-based data transfer.

06:53
Travis Cox: Perspective has a strongly enforced guest mode to prevent against unauthorized writes on the gateway. Perspective integrates with existing corporate identity infrastructures that use two-factor authentication to verify the identity of users, thus adding an extra layer of protection against phishing and brute force attacks. Once the user logs in, they're assigned roles and security levels that can dictate what the user has access to in Perspective applications. For example, it's easy to lock down writes to PLCs, administration screens, and more. Try out the Perspective Module by downloading the free trial of Ignition today.