Inductive Automation Blog

In this Power Hour (our webinar series exclusively for integrators), we will discuss considerations to be aware of when upgrading from Ignition 8.1 to 8.3, as well as a deeper look at new 8.3 features, including Event Streams, Perspective drawing tools, and the new Form component. In addition, we will showcase notable Ignition resources available on the Ignition Exchange. Learn about:

• Ignition 8.1 to 8.3 upgrade considerations

• A deeper dive into Event Streams, Perspective drawing tools, and the Form component

• A showcase of notable Ignition Exchange resources

In this next Power Hour, Inductive Automation's Product Council and Application Engineering teams will showcase new features in the upcoming Ignition 8.3 release, like Event Streams and Perspective Drawing Tools. In addition, they will also showcase Ignition Industry Packs — a new type of resource IA is providing to the Ignition community through the Ignition Exchange.

Tired of closed PLC platforms with proprietary protocols and high licensing costs? This presentation shows you how Opto 22's groov products can help you break through the status quo in industrial automation. With groov EPIC and RIO systems running Ignition Edge out-of-the-box, you can control edge operations and securely democratize production data from the plant floor to IT systems—even to the cloud. Discover the open, cybersecure architecture and free support and training resources that make Opto 22 groov hardware ideal for your next Ignition project.

Transcript:

00:02
Dan White: Hello, Ignition community. How's everybody doing?

00:05
Audience: Good.

00:08
Dan White: Alright. My name is Dan White. I'm Opto 22's Director of Technical Marketing. I've got Garrick Reichert here with me. He's our Senior Application Engineer. And in the theme of "breakthrough" for this year's ICC, we're gonna present to you how you can break through the status quo in industrial automation. So I know you all came here to see a demo, but before we get into that, and Garrick's gonna take the lead on that, I am going to give you a little bit of context and who we are and what we do and how we've done it. So this is where we do everything. It's out at our headquarters in Temecula, California. Beautiful, sunny Southern Cal. Everything is done there. So the design, the manufacture, the support, all of our applications engineering, everything is done here in the USA at our Opto 22 HQ. And actually this year we are celebrating a big milestone. Just last month we were out at Opto celebrating our 50th-year anniversary. So how about that?

01:10
Dan White: Good stuff. And we plan to be around another 50 and we're gonna talk a little bit about how. So for those of you who don't know Opto 22 or haven't heard of us before, we are a 50-year technology innovator from SSR, solid state relays, and an innovative way to manufacture those back in the 1970s, to PC-based I/O and I/O and control systems, to mobility and web-based visualization, and IIoT. We're a market leader in intelligent and distributed I/O systems. We've got millions, hundreds of millions of I/O at over 10,000, probably more, global customers. Yeah, a worldwide reputation for quality, backed by our guaranteed-for-life I/O. So any Opto I/O, and we'll get into a little bit more of that later, but it is guaranteed for life.

02:02
Dan White: Unique in the industry for enabling simple and secure democratization of OT data. A lot of big words in there, but we're gonna talk about that in a minute. And of course, made in the USA and trusted by lots of companies all over the globe. So what is the problem that our products are... That our company is trying to solve with these products. A big part of it is what you see on this screen. So picture's worth a thousand words, and I'm sure many of you guys have seen things like this architecture out in the world. Does this thing have a little laser pointer? So complicated, layered architectures with unsecured connections and closed-off systems. And we're trying to simplify that for you guys. We know what you see out there. We know what this automation stack looks like but the status quo will not suffice.

02:53
Dan White: Using devices like this one that Garrick is gonna demonstrate for you in a bit, we can simplify that architecture. We can provide valuable production data to stakeholders all across the business, all across, and you can do it all with the best cybersecurity tool sets on the market. So what are these products? Well, in theme with Ignition, we've got what we call Ignition I/O, or Flexible I/O on our groov RIO. So the groov RIO is a single block of I/O with software-configurable, eight software-configurable I/O points. It's got two output relays and it even runs Ignition Edge right on board. We've got another version that does energy monitoring. And in my early days with Opto 22, I actually came in as a customer of Opto 22. And what really drew me in was the modularity. And in a lot of ways, that's really what draws a lot of us to Ignition, is that modularity of the architecture. You don't always need everything. Sometimes a little piece will do. Sometimes you need more.

03:56
Dan White: So sometimes you might choose to run Ignition without I/O. And we've run into a lot of cases where we've got customers that wanna run Ignition out at the edge but they maybe don't need physical I/O. Maybe they've already got some PLCs running. Maybe they just want to use it as an edge gateway. And that's where you see here our EPIC Chassis 0 system. So Ignition without I/O. And then of course traditional PLC applications where you need a lot of I/O. And we've got I/O, all types of I/O. Digital I/O, analog I/O, serial I/O. To do just about any type of control platform that you'll see out there. And this is what Garrick is gonna be demoing for you guys today. So stay tuned for that. And then why would you choose to use Opto 22 I/O?

04:44
Dan White: A big part of it is the cost of ownership. We know what it's like out there. We know that sometimes you call and get support, and the first question is, "What's your account number? Where's your credit card number?" At Opto 22, we believe in supporting our customers. If they buy our hardware, we're gonna help them make sure, we're gonna help you make sure that you can use it and that you have all the free tools available to do that. So that means free support. If you call Opto 22 right now, Elizabeth will answer the phone. She'll connect you to an engineer, somebody who's ready to help you, and you're not gonna have to pull out the wallet to do that. Free programming tools, and we'll talk a bit about more what those programming tools are. And then, of course, as I mentioned before, guaranteed lifetime I/O. Built on open standards. So, we don't want customers to come in and feel like they're locked into this architecture of, I have to use this PLC, and I have to use this HMI, and I have to use this OPC server. From the early days at Opto, we've been offering tool kits to allow you to run your programs on your own Windows applications, C++, .NET.

05:54
Dan White: Nowadays, it's Python and all kinds of other tool kits to allow you to have this open architecture and supporting of open protocols and even a lot of proprietary protocols as well. Security is a huge part of what we do. So just because we have open architectures does not mean that these products are not secure. We designed everything that you're about to see today with security in mind. Security, these products have been tested, penetration tested by government applications, by cybersecurity applications, and they pass the test. And we're gonna get into all those fun tools in a little bit. And then of course, robust and reliable. You can't guarantee anything for life if you're not making good stuff. And at Opto, we believe that our stuff's gonna last a lifetime. And that's why when it does fail, if it does fail, we stand behind it 100%. And it's designed to operate in the harshest environments, -20C° to 70C°, hazardous locations. You'll find them out on oil rigs. You'll find them just about anywhere in food and beverage, all kinds of applications. And then innovation.

07:04
Dan White: We've been, innovation has been at the core of what Opto 22 has been doing for 50 years, from an innovative method for making solid state relays, to innovative ways to allow customers back in the '80s to run programs from their IBM 16-bit computer and into a real industrial-grade I/O, to being one of the founding members of the OPC Foundation in the '90s, and of course, nowadays, the Eclipse Foundation that supports MQTT and is trying to spread that message for MQTT and all the things we can do in that space. So now, to kind of dig in a little bit more, what are all these open standards you're talking about? So everything that you see here is supported on groov EPIC. And in the age of IIoT, Digital Transformation, or whatever you want to call it, the data is more important than ever. And you might hear us talking about or using the term democratizing the data to explain this idea that we wanna make the data available to anybody who wants to use it, anybody who can use it in the business, or even outside the business. And so we're gonna collect a lot of that data at the edge. It could be machine data, it could be energy data, OEE, production data.

08:26
Dan White: The people in the business need that data, both on the OT operational side and on the IT side and the business side. And so that's why we choose to support everything you see here. And on top of open protocols, we support OPP. I don't know if you're down with OPP, but for those of you Gen Z-ers, this is an oldies band, or really an oldies rap group from the '90s. But we support other people's protocols as well, through having tools on board like Ignition and [Ignition] Edge, like CODESYS and OpenIEC programming platform, that supports things like EtherNet/IP, PROFINET, EtherCAT, all the industrial protocols that you guys see out there every day. So I like the open standards a little bit better. Talking about the architecture and the security of groov EPIC and RIO as well, open is great and open means accessible. But does open mean not secure? We're here to tell you, no. Open does not necessarily mean not secure. Open standards, open architectures, they're all good, but we don't sacrifice on the security side. And you know, most PLCs that you see out there on plant floors today are the least cyber secure device in that building. They've got open ports. They've got, anybody who comes up with a laptop could get in there and cripple your operation.

09:52
Dan White: So in today's environment, if you're gonna democratize all this data, you better do it securely, and that's why we support things like an integrated firewall on our groov EPIC, like encryption and security certificates that you can either create yourself through a self-signed CA or go to a GoDaddy-type place and create your own CAs through there. We've got an OpenVPN client on our groov, so you can securely connect through a VPN tunnel. We've got network segmentation, but what you see in the picture here and what I've been talking about if you've come by and seen us at the booth all week, is this idea of the separated, isolated networks between your OT and your IT. We've got zero trust user management. So when you plug in your groov EPIC for the first time, the first thing you're gonna have to do is create a username and password. There's no backdoor. There's no default username and password. You plug it in, you set it up. And of course, MQTT pub/sub, which allows us to securely pump data to on-premise brokers or cloud-based brokers without ever having to open up a port in our firewall and expose your important processes that are critical to operation.

11:05
Dan White: And so on top of that we've talked a little bit about before about the difference between the Opto... The Opto experience is the free support. You've got free resources on here for support, and if you're thinking to yourself, "Hey, this stuff sounds good, I'm a little bit intrigued." Well, there's lots of ways to learn about it and get more information and get help once you've got your EPIC and you're starting to play around with it and you go, "Oh, I need this or that." Hop on our website, right in opto22.com, you'll go into chat. Hop in our chat and I think a lot of times people see those chat bubbles pop up in the website and they start typing and they get some automated response. But when you go into our chats, you're gonna get guys like Garrick. You're gonna get guys like Justin back at headquarters today. You're gonna get trained engineers who know our stuff standing by, ready to answer your questions. There's other ways. If you're not into live chat and maybe you don't have a critical issue that needs to be handled in that very moment, feel free to hit us up on email.

12:09
Dan White: We've got also our direct phone line. Like I said, you can call Opto. You'll get a person on the phone. We've also got, and this is great, similar to the Ignition community, the Opto community's got a beautiful online forum that is factory manned by our engineers. It's community guided, so get in there, ask questions, share ideas. That's what it's all about, is making sure that our community is rich with ideas and sharing and keeping it going. So all our love and support for free. And if you don't need to talk to somebody, maybe you're more of a self-guided learner. We've got free training on OptoU, modular setup for all the tools on your groov EPIC. We've got our online configuration tools that'll help you to build out your system, choose your I/O modules, choose your power supplies, your software licenses, customize your system. If you're learning about IoT and how to build out an IoT architecture, we've got great tools like this IoT System Architecture Builder that'll show you everything from down at the plant floor, up to the cloud, how to do it securely, how to do it safely. Amazing videos on YouTube and on our website. Some of the most-watched videos on Node-RED. Our engineer, Terry, who you guys may see later at the Build-a-Thon, is prolific on there. And of course, you'll notice one of the top videos that pulled up was these "How to Run Ignition Edge with OPC or MQTT on Your EPIC."

13:45
Dan White: And then we've got our developer page. So for the guys that like to get down into the nitty gritty, developers that wanna program with Python or with C++ or .NET or wanna connect to our groovs using an API, it's all there. It's all shared. We like to keep it open and flexible. I talked a little bit about the robust reliability of the hardware and the lifetime guarantee. Well, back in 1974, it was that thing over there. In 2018, we launched groov EPIC. And it's all guaranteed for life, all of the solid state I/Os. So we really, we'll stand behind it. We'll make sure it works for you. And if it doesn't work for you, we will replace it right away. And then our community, we've got Opto partners, many... some of you in this room, many also Ignition partners. You can find those on our website. We've got distribution all over the country and as well all over the world. So you shouldn't have a hard time getting Opto gear all around the globe. If you don't see your logo and you're in this room and you're an Ignition and Opto partner and you don't see your logo, I have to apologize. I'm sure I missed a few, but we are proud supporters of the Ignition community.

15:07
Dan White: Many of our longtime integrators are also Ignition integrators. Some of the newer integrators have come to us from Ignition, and some of our newer Inductive integrators have come over from us. So we've got a really thriving group of people out there sharing great ideas, building out great applications, changing the world, and if you don't see your name, I apologize. In that theme of sharing ideas, we love to share success stories. We've got our case study program where we love talking to integrators and end users, finding out about their story, sharing in these applications, and I'm happy to talk to anybody who has a neat application using our gear and wants to get it out there for the rest of the world to see. Of course, we work well with others. Another great reason, you see a lot of companies up on this list that are here today.

16:02
Dan White: Your Inductive, your Cirrus Link, Snowflake. Partner communities are big in what we do. We know that there's a lot of applications out there that we can't do alone, and that Inductive can't do alone. But with this rich network and this rich ecosystem of partners, we can get it done together. And so, as promised, Garrick is ready to show off the latest and greatest. If you like what you have seen or what you're about to see, don't forget to check out Benson's presentation tomorrow. He's got some great stuff with Ignition Exchange resources, UDTs, Perspective templates, and a great energy monitoring application. So let's go. Garrick, take it away.

16:51
Garrick Reichert: Alright, we'll shift gears here and do the inverse of the grade school experience where we tell and then we're gonna show. First of all, this is a PLC out of the box. That's what it's made to do. The base functionality, the base application is a PLC and we're all at least familiar with that in this community, so we're gonna start there and we're gonna build and I'm gonna show you what this thing can do and what we can do with all the power and then introduce some new features that are coming out that I'm excited to show you that'll be out in the near future. As I said, this is a PLC. PLCs have I/O. Dan mentioned I/O, talking about digital, talking about analog. We also have what's called a mix module, which is software programmable I/O. So I'm gonna show you that where we can come in and I can configure this channel to be whatever you need to be to meet your needs there. We've got thermocouples, we've got inputs, outputs, digital, analog. So all of this is available on this one I/O unit and it's also available on the groov RIO, if you're familiar with that, as a standalone module.

17:58
Garrick Reichert: Also within this I/O structure we've got typical wiring specs and all this stuff here, so you can kind of see what it looks like if you would need to wire it up, the actual product specifications for those, and all that's available right here on the unit. So this is all on the unit. I guess I should open with that for those of you who are new. This is actually a web server running on the unit called groov Manage. And you can see up here that I am connected to that via its host name, not an IP address. We can live on those DHCP networks. We can also be secure on those DHCP networks. So IT doesn't feel that kind of ire in the back of their neck when a system like this is deployed. They know that it is trusted in their trust store. So we have all the I/O. Dan also mentioned the controller options. We do have two control options, our PAC control, flowchart-based language, and the CODESYS control. Which is a IEC 61131-3 standard tool set. If you wanna learn more about those, once again, come by the booth after this. We can talk about those.

18:55
Garrick Reichert: We offer our lightweight groov view HMI. If you wanna just do some basic stuff, Node-RED onboard, which is an open source platform that you can use to kind of move data. It's got a lot of cool nodes, including an Ignition node. If you wanted to get data from some source into Ignition, Node-RED can be that avenue that you might wanna use. So these are all tools we're gonna provide. And then you just pick and choose the ones that you want to use to suit your application. Obviously, the next one being Ignition onboard. And so we run Ignition or Ignition Edge. We prefer Ignition Edge, but we can run Ignition on this platform should you need it to run, maybe say, a small historian, where we can spin up a little database, run it local on the unit, give you that kind of local historian, and that you can manage and keep to yourself there within your system without having to go out and get in the SCADA's way and maybe involve IT in this sort of thing. We can handle that data management there.

19:49
Garrick Reichert: We'll get back into the Ignition vein at the end of this. I just wanna touch a few more things regarding, as Dan said, data democratization. We have on board as well OPC UA server capabilities, direct MQTT with Sparkplug B, transmission capabilities, if you would need that in your environment as well, as well as the networking. Full dual isolated NICs on board. And as you can see, this device is actually connected on multiple networks. I am on a static network up there on that "Ethernet 0."

20:19
Garrick Reichert: And then I'm on a DHCP network on that "Ethernet 1." And that DHCP network is actually connected to a cell modem here, which is transmitting data out via MQTT to the cloud. And we'll showcase that in a minute as well. Also, as Dan mentioned, we also have that open VPN tunnel, which is also connected. So anyone that had the credentials on their laptop anywhere in the world with an Ethernet connection could securely log into this unit and do what they needed to do, whether it be troubleshooting maintenance or anything like that.

20:47
Garrick Reichert: We have a couple other features here. One that I will touch on is port redirect. A lot of our Ignition customers can find this very useful in that it allows us to create a software bridge between those isolated NICs that allows us, if we're running that unsecured network with other PLCs that need to be secured, we can jump that bridge. You can get in, program those PLCs, remove that redirect, and then it's like they've never been there and they're completely isolated again.

21:14
Garrick Reichert: All of this can be facilitated directly on the unit or via Ignition using API calls and things like that. So you can program this in your Ignition environment to allow your techs to create these rules and maybe enable VPN, enable the port redirect, jump into their PLC of choice, program it and back out. And now you've created an audit log of that, of every time they checked one of those boxes to enable access to that, you've got that logged in there.

21:42
Garrick Reichert: The next big one is, as he mentioned, security. He mentioned the web server certs. So this device allows web server certs. As we mentioned, I showed you I am secure. It is in my trust store. You can generate the CSR, send it to your IT department. IT department will send you back a nice certificate you can load onto this device, knowing that everywhere on your network, this is a trusted device, like a web share, or maybe a database, things that you would routinely access with your PC, knowing that it is trusted, and I have access to it.

22:09
Garrick Reichert: Also, the opposite of that, we can put stuff into our trust store if we need to connect to things, MQTT listed, other things up there, data services, databases, things like that, where I wanna know that I'm connecting to a trusted version when I transmit data. So it works both ways with that. So we can do that and provide that level of IT security that many to all PLCs cannot. And then a custom built-in firewall. So this allows you to create custom rules on those different Ethernet ports, eth0, eth1, VPN. That allows you to inhibit access to certain functions. Maybe you don't want someone using CODESYS over the tunnel. We can take that and disable that over VPN. Now, someone has to be on eth0 on the static network to just program the unit.

22:56
Garrick Reichert: So we're locking it down in different ways so that you can tailor it to what works best for your application. It's not a, "You can only do X and that's the only way we can secure this." We've given you the options, we're gonna give you all the tools that you need to secure it within your infrastructure. The next one with security in mind is that accounts. Dan had mentioned creating a user account out of the box. You do have to define one local user as a local admin. But beyond that, we have access to LDAP, Active Directory Networks, directory, so that we can let IT manage the user password stuff. So now IT handles when do we update passwords. IT handles when an employee gets let go, HR sends them the email, that account is now locked out and does not have access to the system. Because in previous iterations of HMIs, you might have a guest, an admin, an engineer account, and by the end of the week, there's a sticky note with the admin password on the HMI itself. I'm speaking from experience.

23:55
Garrick Reichert: This eliminates that need, and lets it all be managed externally so that the peace of mind you guys have in IT is the same. And then we get into info and help. These are just, we can go into these details later if you guys want to learn more. We have a full RESTful API suit on board that you could leverage if you wanted to make RESTful API calls to get any bit of data out of this system, I/O data, configuration data, things like that. It's all available to you within the system. But I wanna get in and kind of focus on Ignition here at the end of this before we jump to a Q&A section. And I know you guys probably can't see on the front display too well, it's pretty small, but if you wanna come take a look at it after this, you can see this. This device is actually running a beta version of our upcoming 4.0 EPIC firmware that now allows or will allow you to run a Perspective client on the front touch to screen here.

24:47
Garrick Reichert: So now you can actually leverage all this power. All of these things are templates that have UDTs behind them and Ignition that now I can just deploy on my Edge gateway, run it here directly without having to worry about, "Do I create a custom interface here? Is it managed where? Where's the tags?" We're building it all in that system. So you can kind of tell this is Opto 22's Ignition Cloud Edition that we are running has all of our demos on it, as you can see on the left. And I am currently focused on this demo here, connected over MQTT. And we can go ahead and start a process on it. So there's got a car wash simulated. And you'll note if you're close enough, you'll be able to see the color change on these because these are the same built templates here. So we can walk through it as it starts. You'll see the things start changing color between here and there. Since we're leveraging the same templates, there's not a disconnect if I use a third-party HMI or anything like that. It's all built into one platform: Ignition.

25:44
Garrick Reichert: And so that's how we leverage that, we can use this to bring a lot of resources in and pretty powerfully deploy these systems now and in the future. 4.0, we're really excited about it. There's one other thing I wanna mention, there's a lot of other stuff that might interest this crowd and this audience specifically before we spend a couple of minutes on Q&A for any of those that you might have, is we're also going to be introducing in a kind of power user capacity, the ability to do containerization on these units. So, kind of one of those things that some of our customers, particularly this type of audience, might be very interested to know and be able to utilize and grow and flex some of the power that can be involved in this unit.

26:26
Garrick Reichert: And yeah, any of you could go to ice.groov.com right now and you could go to this unit and you could start seeing the data that's flowing from there. So, that's what we like to see. We wanted the power to the people, data democratization. And with that, we'll open it up to questions for Dan and I. And if you guys got anything, we got a couple of minutes.

26:43
Audience Member 1: That initial password that you're talking about. So you buy a new device, you put in the first username and password. But then you said the other username and passwords can be handled by LDAP or whatever. But that initial username and password still on there. So the employee gets removed, but they may still know that password.

27:04
Garrick Reichert: That would typically be set up by the initial engineer. So there is a little bit, you could change that password. It's always passwords...

27:09
Audience Member 1: Well, that was my question. Can it be changed through the REST API?

27:13
Garrick Reichert: Passwords, can passwords be set?

27:15
Audience Member 1: Is that a dumb question?

27:16
Garrick Reichert: I don't believe passwords can be changed. No, it's not a dumb question. That's a good question. 'Cause we have a public-facing API, and so there's a lot of inter-working. I don't believe passwords...

27:24
Audience Member 1: That way, if you did have an employee leave, you could use the REST API... Your fleet of devices could get all changed at the same time.

27:32
Garrick Reichert: Yes.

27:32
Audience Member 1: Okay. Just a thought.

27:33
Garrick Reichert: No, no. Thank you for that. Maybe I have to disable the buzzer here before too long.

27:40
Dan White: We answered everyone's questions? Oh, there's one.

27:46
Audience Member 2: Are there any plans for other VPNs besides OpenVPN like WireGuard or Tailscale?

27:51
Garrick Reichert: Yes, there are. We've actually done because, as I mentioned, with containerization and things like that, you would be able to load whatever software you might need and you can test that out, see if it works. We have had customers use other VPN software on board in the past. So that's definitely gonna be an option.

28:11
Audience Member 3: A quick question, you can connect HDMI to that to have a larger screen?

28:18
Garrick Reichert: Yes.

28:19
Audience Member 3: How many can you connect, just one?

28:22
Garrick Reichert: Just one HDMI port with dual USB, so you could extend this display to a larger monitor, touch screen, keyboard, mouse, if you wanted to put it in like, you know, a control room type environment where you would wanna have that. But yeah, that is also an option and available.

28:37
Audience Member 4: It came with Node-RED installed on it. Can that control the I/O as well or is it?

28:42
Garrick Reichert: Yes. Yeah. Okay...

28:44
Dan White: We've got seven nodes that are in there that you can use to control I/O, read and write I/O, scan I/O, read and write from our UI, or read and write from our PAC control programming software. Or if you're using CODESYS, you could use OPC nodes to read and write. So yeah, Node-RED is fully compatible communicating with I/O with variables, process variables as well.

29:08
Audience Member 5: Can the user management for groov manage the LDAP? Can that be used in CODESYS as well?

29:16
Garrick Reichert: No, it cannot right now. CODESYS has its own user management groups if you need to configure and set those up. You'd have to do it within that environment 'cause that's all the IDE side compiled from external.

29:25
Audience Member 5: Thank you.

29:27 
Audience Member 6: In the new version, is PAC Control able to do online editing now?

29:34
Garrick Reichert: PAC Control will function the same as it has always functioned. But good question.

29:40
Dan White: For those of you who aren't familiar with PAC Control, it's our legacy programming environment that's been with us since the '80s. And so a bit limited in terms of that.

29:48
Garrick Reichert: Yeah.

29:53
Audience Member 7: I was curious about the CODESYS runtime versus Ignition and what kind of controls are there to keep one from hosing the other, I guess, and making sure that your PLC functions are...

30:05
Garrick Reichert: Yeah, the PLC is a separate runtime engine that grabs a real-time thread and is totally dedicated to the PLC operations. Ignition is gonna... It's just like if you were in the field with a standard PLC and an Ignition at a PC. It's gonna function exactly like that.

30:19
Audience Member 7: Thank you.

30:22
Audience Member 8: Forgive me, I'm not familiar with you guys' product at all, it's first time I've had experience with it. So does it have to operate as an edge gateway and remote to Ignition or can it operate as a standalone PLC over Modbus TCP as well and interface with everything that...

30:37
Dan White: Yes, that's the latter. It does not have to run Ignition. It comes with Ignition pre-installed as a convenience and your choice whether or not you license it. In some cases you want that Edge gateway because you want that redundancy at the edge and that store-and-forward capabilities and things like that. But in other cases you may have a robust network and maybe you just want to publish MQTT data or expose OPC data to Ignition or to the software platform of your choice and that's also totally well and good. We put all the tools there, but you don't have to use them all.

31:07
Audience Member 8: And it can do both simultaneously, right?

31:08
Dan White: Yes, absolutely.

31:08
Garrick Reichert: Yes. Yeah, remember I started. This is a PLC.

31:13
Audience Member 8: Thank you guys.

31:13
Garrick Reichert: First and foremost.

31:14
Dan White: I'm glad you said that too, 'cause I think sometimes we talk all about this stuff and then people forget it. You know, many of our applications are traditional PLC control applications.

31:24
Moderator: Last one.

31:27
Audience Member 9: With the remote I/O is it possible to use that to transmit I/O from one of those modules to say another one at another end. Analog input on one side, analog output to the other remote I/O?

31:38
Dan White: Sure, I think.

31:39
Garrick Reichert: Yeah, I mean of course, like standard PLC functions we can wrap it past anything we need to in the system.

31:44
Dan White: You wanna put an output signal out of one and then wire it to an input of another?

31:46
Garrick Reichert: And put, wire it to another? Or even through programmatically?

31:50
Dan White: A lot of our learning centers even do that. I know that sometimes we've got inputs wired back to outputs just to show the dual functionality. Yeah, you can do that.

32:00
Moderator: We're at time.

32:00
Garrick Reichert: Alright. Thank you guys for attending.

32:02
Dan White: Thanks guys. Stop by the booth if you have any other questions.

Ericsson’s 5G-focused solutions turn connectivity into productivity by delivering intelligent communications at the edge that are more secure, versatile, and easier to manage than WiFi. See real-world business-critical use cases that exemplify how private 5G solutions accelerate operations, improve reliability, and enhance working conditions, all while reducing cost and latency.

Transcript:

00:00
Michael Dickens: My name's Michael Dickens. I'm with Ericsson Enterprise Solutions. Formally, you might have known us from Cradlepoint. We build everything 5G-focused. Our solutions are very much focused on from edge to core, and RAN. You might know us from the cell phones back in the day as Ericsson, but oftentimes many of you on your 5G phones today we'll be connecting to our public networks on Verizon, AT&T, things like that. Today, we're much more focused on radio solutions for private 5G, the edge devices, which I'll go into that for the hardware, but everything around 4G, 5G, networking; those communications, we really focus on building a managed network for communicating often in OT environments. I'll have a whole bunch of examples I'll go through to get your minds thinking about all the solutions you may be doing. But of course, how does that work with Inductive? I'll get into that as well.

00:51
Michael Dickens: First off, we focus on making sure all these items are completely managed from one location, NetCloud manager. You'll find this up in our cloud. We automatically register the devices for any private radios, core networking routers, and they're all 5G-enabled, focusing on those SIMs and getting connectivity for those. You'll see that we actually have a lot of layers and stacks on here. Every time I talk to someone from Inductive, they're like, "Okay, we need to talk MQTT, or we need an API, and we need to be able to run STKs." All these items are ran in the cloud and distributed automatically, organizationally, to each of the devices or the core RANs that we're running. You'll see on the bottom that one of the partnerships mainly we have in the networking world. We're talking about security and communications. We include all those pieces. But our focus on the 5G side is that intelligence for communication on those so that you can know your network is secure and running for your applications that you're running at the edge.

01:50
Michael Dickens: Some of the devices that we have, we'll start from the bottom and then we'll start moving up into the private 5G world. But the classic Cradlepoint point side, we have come out with a couple new products, one, R2100. This is an IoT/OT device that has included antennas. It has Bluetooth, it has Ethernet, it has Wi-Fi, but of course 5G communications; you can just drop a SIM in to it. The nice thing about this product, it includes all the antennas and everything into one IP67 device so that you can drop it in anywhere. We find this; we're running it outdoors. We're on lift trucks, we're on vehicles, things like that, that are mobile. Then the devices below, you'll see that are devices that can run Ignition. Anything that supports Docker containers will support Ignition. I'll show you how we actually distribute those here in a little bit. The 920 and S700, and IBR200: basically, you're going down the road, and you're getting different throughput for each of these devices. And it's important that you can run these on public networks, again, like Verizon, rest of the world, British Telecom, Vodafone, things like that, depending on where you're deploying these. Or you can put a private SIM into them. So, you can get communications to your devices at a local area, whether it's a manufacturer, a stadium, depending on where you're using those to get communications.

03:05
Michael Dickens: Some of the other devices that we have, we also find ourselves often into retail or quick-serve restaurants. For example, if you went over to a Starbucks this morning to get your coffee, you can have a Cradlepoint running there. Oftentimes we find we're doing not just communications for the internet for that, but we're running applications like Inductive Automation, Ignition, at the edge to manage door controls, interfaces for the fire alarm control panels, things like that. They like to run that application on a separate air-gapped network. They may use us for backup internet in the DMZ, but this is a nice place to be able to build those applications depending on where you're deploying in the world, whether it's a vehicle, a retail store, or if it's the closet for the MDF for where you're running your control systems for a building, etc.

03:50 
Michael Dickens: How do we deploy Ignition, for example? So, I have a few examples I want to talk to you about up here. First off are edge apps. What this is from our NetCloud manager, you're able to deploy Python code natively to any of our boxes at the edge. This makes it really easy for you to create an app, manage it, do what you need, very lightweight per code. Oftentimes we are running, for example, like MQTT Mosquitto at the edge, and you'll integrate with that. So you can talk MQTT to your standard things. This is a really easy way for any of our devices if you have an application running. Now, edge containers, we orchestrate this also from the cloud as well. Ignition actually keeps up to date all their devices and their software in their cloud so that we can just automate the point to one or thousands of devices at a time.

04:36 
Michael Dickens: This makes it really easy because we just do standard Docker Compose to be able to bring that out to the edge and be able to deploy your application. Then you can manage Ignition as you want from all the different devices. Now, HMI always comes up, and so through NetCloud manager, if you ever need like a VPN or just things like that to be built, you can do that or natively from NetCloud. You can pop in and do like VNC or RDP or SSH, whatever you need from the cloud to easily get to your applications or even to the container itself, running Ignition so you can manage that remotely. Whereas oftentimes we're not always on the plant for going and walking to every machine, we wanna be able to do it from our desk. This makes it really, really easy. We also have connectors into like AWS, Azure, all the standard platforms that we build those, so we can automate that connection into there for the connectivity.

05:23 
Michael Dickens: I know Ignition can do that as well. So it's just a basis of what applications you're running where. But what my biggest point is here, all the different interfaces and communications that we have built into these boxes to be able to do communication, those are available to the container. Now, that being said, great, networking's wonderful, but we do build security atop all this where you all hear about Zero Trust Network Access and things like that. Oftentimes, where the vendors coming in and we need that remote access, well, they can create that access for a very specifically... For example, I work with 7-Eleven, and they need access directly to the gas stations to update the firmware on the pumps themselves. Just that management piece. Well, we have a Cradlepoint there. They can create that access for you to get directly to that application only and make it really, really easy.

06:11 
Michael Dickens: Now, I wanted to introduce, this is a little bit newer concept for some people, but the same internet that you're using from your phone today, we create networks for that. There's a couple of different components that come into that. First off, there's a radio. Right? Oftentimes we think about Wi-Fi and radio. Everyone walks up to my table over there and be like, "Oh, we got a bunch of Wi-Fi here?" No, it's very focused on 4G/5G networking. That's where the Ericsson piece comes into play. We actually deploy networks from small to very, very large statewide networks for private networking. Private, when I say "private," I wanna be specific. This is for your applications. It's not like you're going to Verizon saying, "Hey, can I buy SIM and connect a bunch of devices?" This is for your specific applications controlled by you, just like you're deploying Wi-Fi in a location, but you can do a lot more with it and more security.

06:57 
Michael Dickens: A couple of the pieces that come with it. One, management. That's always important. We can do on-prem management or in the cloud; cloud makes it always easier. You'll need your radios; we have a very wide selection of different radios for different spectrums. When you go around the world, you'll see that... I have a little example later on where we're deploying, but you need Spectrum to be able to talk on. 5 GHz, 2.4 standard for Wi-Fi, we're looking from all the way down to 600 MHz up to millimeter wave for when we're deploying these. So, we have a whole bunch of different radios for these. Some are built to be outdoors, like when you're driving down the road, you see the tower, the three antennas. That's some of the things we do for outdoors deployment. But then we also have with something called "red dots." They're the indoor radios so that you can deploy into a factory floor, a warehouse, wherever you may be using it. We're able to deploy and broadcast 5G into those locations as well, depending on the Spectrum.

07:50 
Michael Dickens: If you're North-American-based, US, CBRS comes up quite a bit. It's a nice Spectrum FCC opened up for us to be able to use for these environments that you can use for your deployments as well. Last but not least, you need a core. I always talked about this is like the Wi-Fi controller, but it's the core for the 5G network: The brains, the communication, the control, where does my SIM get authenticated? This is all controlled here, so we include this as well. We also include SIMs with the devices so that you can pop them in there, or you can do eSIM to deliver to your devices as well, like using Intune or an MDM to Apple devices, Zebra scanners, things like that. We know there's a lot of communication. We do build routers and edge OT router devices. We know there's gonna be a whole bunch of other devices on our network as well, so we work with all of them as well. Very common.

08:42 
Michael Dickens: Now, some of the reasons that we're doing this is really often one specific application. When we walk into a customer, they need to have the communication up and running. Sometimes that's voice. We find that they need voice communication in a remote site. LMR is very common, but we'll start getting other communication. Time-critical, I mean, you can be driving 500 kilometers an hour and still be connected and jumping from RAN to RAN. So, it's really powerful, very fast. You're able to have that secure communication always. All the time I talk to someone, we're running our AGV; it's on Wi-Fi, it drops, we have to stop for safety reasons. We need that coverage and ubiquitous communication. That's where 5G really is able to answer that need.

09:24 
Michael Dickens: Also, low, low latency. Right? All our applications now are needed to be able to communicate in a very fast and quick manner for things to happen. Door controls, whatever it may be. Safety reasons: We're running into a lot of safety applications where these need to be very cool fast. We are down to like five, two milliseconds sometimes for these networks. And that's 5G terms. 4G, 40 milliseconds, 30 milliseconds. But it's really important for these to be able to talk quickly and things to be able to happen.

09:52 
Michael Dickens: Also, the local management and serviceability. A lot of our partners, I know some of you are partners, are deploying it here, and they are able to manage these devices, but we also have services to help manage 5G. 'Cause we know, 3GPP, that's the IEEE of the world for networking for us. It's very complex. We try to make it easy for you to deploy these. Now, some of the developers in the room, I know you're like, "Hey, the IT guys just bring my network. I don't have to worry about that," but we're here to help your IT guys. If you're just doing the developing part, no problem.

10:24 
Michael Dickens: Something new and interesting we've been doing on these 5G systems is indoor positioning. We can get down to one meter. So, let's say you have a 2 million-square-feet plant. Where is George? George is carrying an iPhone or a scanner from Zebra or a Google Android device. I need to know where George is right now because there's something going on. Boom. We can able to pull that up and have triangulation of knowing exactly where anything is. We're also running into some of our manufacturers for automobiles. They have actually smart torque wrenches. They're very expensive. They need them. They need a monitor. They're doing exact torquing that they need because it's for our safety's driving the vehicles that it's done correctly. Well, they're connecting that via 5G. Where is that wrench? We don't know. Someone moved it over here, somewhere. Well, we can track exactly where those things are as well. So, interesting to be able to start doing this tracking systems.

11:20 
Michael Dickens: Another interesting thing that we started seeing is that coverage for AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile. You go into this big metal behemoth oil and gas or a factory. RF is just not working. My cell phone, I can't make a call, right? E911. I need to be able to put that out, or I need to be able to have information on what's going on. Well, at the exact same time as we're deploying the coverage for the... Sorry, the private 5G network, we can deploy coverage extension. So, you can take basically pump 5G network from Verizon into your entire plant floor so that you can make sure you have communications on both sides of the world. Now, we do some QoS and make sure your applications are working and everything like that. But this is kind of an add-on feature that you can make sure that you have coverage for the standard users that you have coming into your network.

12:09 
Michael Dickens: This has been really useful for some systems to be able to replace their DaaS, which is quite expensive, and be able to have communication. Now, we're doing this mostly on the indoor stuff because the macro networks, it's the carrier's job to cover the outdoors. But we do run into worlds where, for example, a mine. They're out in the middle of nowhere. They're going deep into the tunnels. They still want to have their cell phones. If it's just AT&T, for example, though the carrier's not gonna be able to connect you down that mine, but we can. We can run that signal down in there, and it's great for safety and communications. Sometimes I'm the middle of nowhere, I just wanna call my wife, and, well, I need service. Here we go. This is a good solution to be able to get that done.

12:54
Michael Dickens: So, I want to go through some use cases, kinda get your minds thinking here, and then in about 10 minutes we'll talk about that. So, from the list here, I won't read them all off. Some of the main ones I've been seeing for this where we could be deploying and doing communications for Inductive is oil and gas, mining, ports, utilities, warehouse logistics, and, of course, a lot, a lot of manufacturing. So, these are all really rough environments sometimes. You don't want to be taking a cable and moving it again. Power may be there, maybe not. This makes it easy. So, if someone walked up to me and the engineering manager said, "Hey, we need to move that development system that's manufacturing this 20 feet," they're like, "Well, all right, we gotta get the CAT6 guys over here, the fiber guys over here; it's gonna be a month; it's gonna cost this X amount of dollars operationally, blah, blah, blah." Well, I just put a 5G gateway there, put a SIM in it, boom, move it to 20 feet. I don't care. No problem, anytime.

13:48
Michael Dickens: I also find there's a lot of third-party applications. One of them being kiosks where they get hard hats. You forgot your gear today. They have to go to the kiosk. Well, they don't want them on their network; they just give them a 5G SIM, segment it off, and say, "There you go. You can drop in to your kiosk anywhere;" you may be able to go. These are common use cases across all these type of segments. But we actually go down to the nitty-gritty specific applications as well. But the network is the network, comms or comms. Nothing's gonna work without communication and be able to make that work.

14:21
Michael Dickens: We are seeing this, like I said, globally start to deploy. This might be a little small for you guys to see up there, but there is a whole bunch of examples up here of what solutions that we can talk about. You can take a look online that you can get case studies on there and see why they deployed it and what's going on for each of these. I have a few examples I'm gonna go through. I just want you guys to know that this is a technology that's ubiquitous across the whole earth. Right? We were deploying in all kinds of different locations. It can be tough to deploy in those locations, but Spectrum and RF, 3GPP, 5G networking is a great solution to be able to do this. I do run into scenarios where we're doing both, right? We have 5G doing the deployment, then you gotta go farther to the next site. Okay, you do point-to-point microwave; that's great.

15:08
Michael Dickens: And then from the edge devices, we redistribute again, like say LoRaWAN, for example. So, you start seeing how these networks start stacking and then give you your application to have communications as needed. Right? Often I do cover miles in They were like, "Oh, can we put a 4K camera right there?" and LoRaWAN could do that, but the throughput is not there, right? They were like, "Oh, can we put a 4K camera right there?" I'm like, "Sure, no problem." 5G, we absolutely can do that. LoRa, mm, I'm not sure how you're gonna get all that video across there. But that couple sensors around it, absolutely; we could totally do that. And the solution come all together across from our gateways to the RAN to the network, to the core, to the whole communication and the data center.

15:48
Michael Dickens: First example I wanna talk about is Toyota Material Handling. So, they were actually having a lot of issues with Wi-Fi, simple as that. They were going outdoors, getting pallets, deploying this stuff, getting parts, and they're using it for their own solutions. And they build these actual lifting machines themselves, actually. And they were having a lot of issues operationally for it. Just be able to go out there, and what pallet am I supposed to be grabbing? I can't scan it; it's not working. And so issues would start backing up, and we all know how manufacturing works in that world. Time is money. Their ROI was within, I think it was a month or two months that they got their ROI on this because their operational efficiency went through the roof for this. So, really interesting solutions for this, and it really helps...

16:34
Michael Dickens: One of our partners actually helped deploy this, and their productivity went really well. They're very, very happy. Now, the cool part is, though, now that they have this network, they're starting to look at other things that can move to this. I always, every time someone comes to me, they're like, "We want a 5G network." Well, "Is Wi-Fi not cutting it for you?" And they're like, "No." This is why, why, why. And so there's that one application that gets them into the door that makes them happy, but then you can start deploying other things and then just network. 'Cause there's space; there's bandwidth for you to be able to use.

17:08
Michael Dickens: Another one in manufacturing. They were actually looking at doing different radios, and they really just needed coverage. They have a whole bunch of different users on cell phone. They pay the carrier for their service. And of course, through all the metal in this building, they were not able to get connectivity. So, we're able to expand this using our coverage extension. They actually just deployed mainly the coverage extension. Then they moved to the Ericsson private 5G side because they saw the value of it, and they'd be able to have communications for those applications. But just walking into a building and not having service is just, doesn't work well for getting anything done. And so, we really solved this solution. It's just, I look at it as a complete bonus add, but I'm starting to discover that I thought private 5G is what everyone's gonna want. No, they just want coverage. They just want their cell phone to work. And so we're running into this quite a bit. It's really interesting for their communications. And then they started looking at doing AGVs, things like that for the communication on each of those things that are moving around so they can do new solutions 'cause they have the network to be able to get that done.

18:16
Michael Dickens: Another one, a logistics solution. More AGVs and AMRs. We're starting to see that. AI, communication automation, we're seeing that grow. You're not able to get that done without having the communication to be able to have those vehicles moving. The biggest piece I see until most of these are safety. They have these devices, pallet movers, what's going on, and they wanna make sure they have the communication to make sure what's going on. I was actually talking to one that was doing... Let's see. It was the largest retailer, if you will, the big W. They had their big, big things where they had pallets on multiple layers, moving these boxes automated so they could start doing... They were running that on Wi-Fi as well. They would stop. They're going 40 miles an hour, they lost connectivity, they were not able to run anymore. So, they would just stop. But you know where they stopped? Where there's no signal. So, they had to walk over to the machine, put it in neutral, move it over to the system to where they had communications, and get it started again. Private 5G fixed that for them because they were able to get communication across all of it and get all the other systems that are delivering and automating for all these pieces. It's really interesting to be able to have comms to be able to make it work.

19:31
Michael Dickens: Another manufacturer, this one's very focused in the EV charging space. So, they need to be able to have comms for the chargers themselves. And so sometimes you walk in these places, and they have 30 chargers in a lot. But are they gonna run fiber underneath the concrete for each of those solutions for those there? No, it gets very costly. And so they're able to get Cradlepoint routers connected into those machines and have all the chargers working and communicating and having that. I even have some that are doing it out in the parking lot for electric vehicles getting... They're all sending and manufactured, waiting to be shipped out, but then they have updates. And so we drop in a tower in the middle of the parking lot that starts sending all the updates to the cars for the communication. So, we're starting to see EV start to grow in that type of world for just the cars' communication, but the manufacturing process, but then also for anything else that they may have ancillary for in the field out in the middle of nowhere. You know, I'm driving to Texas from here. Well, I need to stop at the EV place. Well, they need to have all of that communicating. And so private 5G. Honestly, mostly private 4G in those scenarios, but both work in those solutions.

20:44
Michael Dickens: This one may be a little more common for you guys, but we're starting to see Newmont, for example, mining solutions that they're in these really tough locations. This one's more big earth movers digging down into the ground and getting materials. If you build solutions for this, you'll know that it's not a great location. It's dusty; it's dirty. It has to be very tough. We were able to deploy this tower, for example. It looks very similar to the ones if you see them outside. We do exact same thing as a macro radios to connect all the devices in these giant, giant, large areas. We're able to get the coverage communication working for all these things and even run 4K cameras getting machine vision from all the different things that they're doing.

21:25
Michael Dickens: I have another one I didn't put on here, but it's a gold mine that they're running that they had the big earth movers. They make about 300K an hour for those earth movers for the giant dump trucks, like big as this room, driving. They actually installed our routers, four of them, while it's moving because the cost of having downtime. And their goal was to move to a full autonomous vehicle so that the drivers, they don't have to jump on and off while it's running; they'll just run by themselves. That's the goal. And so they'll be able to have a network that can do those comms. And people remotely come in, for example, tough turns, whatever may be going on, they can do that over the network, which is a really interesting solution, and start optimizing for those things and having communication.

22:14
Michael Dickens: Now, oil and gas. We're starting to see this grow quite a bit as well. Now, oil and gas can mean a lot of different things. I see the stations out in the middle of the ocean. We're starting to deploy for those communications. A lot of times it's satellite backhaul or point-to-point if it's close enough to shore. But then we redistribute that with 5G for all the comms on the oil rig itself for communicating. 'Cause it's pure metal. So, we have to turn up the power a bit on these to be able to get the communication going in for the RF. But having that versus having just Wi-Fi, and the amount of APs, and where would they put them, this makes it very simple 'cause we can deploy four radios on each of the side, bring it in, or define if it's really tall or down. We can point those radios as we need via antennas. Just to put Wi-Fi APs across this whole entire thing, I don't know how I would even design it because you have to be doing it for years to know every single area, what you need to communicate with, how it's gonna work. We make it very simple 'cause we did it with four radios. Makes it super easy.

23:13
Michael Dickens: Now, then when we talk about oil and gas on land, it's usually very, very distributed. And so that's another good point. So, I do, in my designs, I'll do point-to-point and then redistribute via 5G for those different areas for those communication. If you're able to get fiber, wonderful, that's great. But most of the time those environments we're not able to have the communication. But of course if you guys know, all the applications there locally that you want to have that access to, no one wants to drive the three hours out to that one rig to be able to make sure that it's working correctly or you lost connectivity. This makes it a lot easier to have that comms up and running.

23:51
Michael Dickens: Now, those are my slides. I wanted to leave five minutes for any questions that may be out there. Yeah, it's our own SIMs. It's your SIM; it's your network. You do have to pay for the radio, the core network, the services that get it out there. But no, you're not paying the carriers for that. That's your own network. Now, the only other thing may be Spectrum. I would recommend CBRS here, or you may have to go through a third party; even maybe Verizon might lease you use in Spectrum, depending on your needs.

24:19
Michael Dickens: If it's private 5G, for example, with CBRS, you don't have to pay anything. There are paid-for licenses to get priority access on that Spectrum. But if you're in the middle of nowhere, probably no one's using it. Your land, it's free.

24:35
Michael Dickens: Yes and no. It does cost quite a bit more than Wi-Fi 'cause the radio is more expensive, but I can cover a lot more space. So, it comes down to your applications, right? Then, of course, your devices need to have 5G or 4G radios in them too.

24:52
Michael Dickens: I always look at it as a hybrid solution. If you're using Wi-Fi today and then your apps are running okay on it, I'm not gonna push you to go to 5G. But if you have applications we're not working that well on it, I'll say, "Okay, let's start implementing it and do a hybrid solution," absolutely. Now, if you were talking, I only had a thousand devices, and it's this large area I had to deploy a thousand APs 'cause it's such a large area, we may be able to make that a lot easier for a transition to 5G. It really depends.

25:18
Audience Member 5: You mentioned IP67, but do you also have, like, C1D1 hazardous parts?

25:24
Michael Dickens: We do on some of the routers. It depends. There's a lot of different specs out there on the devices we do. The radios as well. It depends on what type of environment you're going into. We do have that on all our spec sheets, stuff like that. But for the hazardous or electrical areas, things like that, we do have some of those specs, yes.

25:45
Michael Dickens: Wonderful. If you have any more... Wanna talk more about this, we'll be right there at the booth. If you have any questions, please come out to us. Thank you.

Whether you're new to Ignition or just want a refresher, this session is made for all. The Inductive Automation Training team covers all the basic knowledge and fundamental features you need to get started with Ignition.

Transcript:

00:01
Jayson Thorpe: Hello everyone, welcome to Learning Ignition Fundamentals. We're about to get started here. How about that keynote, huh? I wanna thank you all for joining us for this session.

00:13
Aryanna Brown: My name is Aryanna, I am a Tier Two Software Support Engineer Team Lead here at Inductive Automation. I've been working here for about three years, and if you have ever sought support with our software, you've most likely spoken to me or my team.

00:27
Jayson Thorpe: My name is Jayson, also called JT. I'm a technical trainer, I'm on the training team at Inductive Automation. I started out in support, but I'm in the training department now. If you've taken any of the core classes or any of the other training courses we offered at Inductive Automation, you may have met me before. And today, we are talking about Learning Ignition Fundamentals. So we're gonna be going over some pretty preliminary information on Ignition, what is it, how do you use it? Why do you use it? Pretty much those big three main questions. Summarize, Ignition is a platform, it's an application development platform for you to build, design your own industrial automation applications for SCADA, HMI, MES and more. Some of the cool things about it, it's cross-platform written in Java, so it's operating system agnostic, web-based deployment and modular design. We're gonna talk about that modular design here in a moment, and the web-based deployment as we go through our demonstration today.

01:28
Jayson Thorpe: Since its inception, Ignition has evolved quite a bit. We have four different editions of Ignition to choose from. We have our Standard Edition for most use cases, we have Ignition Edge, for edge of network devices, usually gathering data, forwarding it to a more centralized gateway. We have our Ignition Cloud Edition, if you need to leverage hosting your gateway in the Cloud, this is available through web-based marketplaces like Amazon Web Services, and then we have my favorite Ignition maker edition for your home automation personal non-commercial projects. Ignition's modular design, what does that mean? Modular design essentially means that all of the major functionality you may want out of your gateway comes with a respective module, this means that you can easily customize your installation, things like the two different visualization modules we have, Perspective Vision are each their own module. Things like tag history, SQL Bridge, what this means is that you can really customize. Oh, oh. Oh, well, that's our last slide for now, anyway.

02:39
Jayson Thorpe: What this means is you can really customize your gateway or your entire network of gateways depending on what you need different gateways to do. You're not paying for things that you don't need a certain gateway to do, only for the things that you do need. So for this demonstration, we're gonna be going and installing Ignition, getting started with it, we're gonna start designing pretty quickly here. But what we wanna show you is that anybody can go to inductiveautomation.com, download Ignition, install it, and get started designing in about five minutes. Here we are in Inductive Automation's website, and anywhere at the top right, you can go and download Ignition for your respective operating system. We however, today have the downloader or the installer already downloaded, so we're just gonna run it. And we're gonna go through a basic install, which means we're gonna go with all of the core modules here.

03:36
Jayson Thorpe: Now, I said that we can download Ignition and get started in about five minutes, which in the SCADA space is a very quick amount of time to download our application. Once we download the appli... Once we install Ignition, here we are just making a couple of decisions as we go, we are gonna go with just the typical default installation to include all of the core modules. One of the things we also decided was the service name and the port that Ignition is going to use. And here we are, the gateway is already starting up, and once the gateway is installed, we pick which edition we wanna run. And what we're about to see here in the web browser, right now, we're using Google Chrome, let's create our user and password. But what we have here, in a few minutes, we've installed Ignition and we're running our gateway. Here in the web browser we're looking at the Gateway web page, which is the interface to your Ignition installation. Since Ignition is cross-platform, written in Java, you can load this on to a Linux box or of course, Mac or Windows, have your gateway running in a server box in a closet somewhere, and anybody that's able to reach that gateway over your network, will be able to interface with the gateway web page that we're gonna see here.

05:02
Jayson Thorpe: Gateway started. We're gonna start from scratch, we're actually gonna end up loading up a gateway back up here in a moment. What we see here is the Gateway webpage. Anybody who, you may notice, a local host is what we're accessing. Otherwise, this would be the IP of the gateway. Anybody on our network that can hit the gateway host can access the gateway web page. And here on the home page where we start out is where we can download some of these software peripherals to run a designer and also our Vision and Perspective run times. Next stop on our... Oh, still on the home page, we have links to the user manual, links to our community and as the exchange of our forums, different ways to get started with Ignition and to learn more about it as you go. Thank you. Now we're gonna go to status page, where we do have to log in, and the status pages is where you can get a bird's eye view of your entire Ignition sub-system. We can see the status of how many connections we have, like database connections, our device connections, how many tags we have, and even performance metrics.

06:15
Jayson Thorpe: On the config tab, the last stop of our tour here, is where you go to change any of those settings that we're looking at over in status, if we need to add a new gateway connect or add a connection, like a gate network connection, your database connection, OPC device, all of that would be configured here. Now, you may notice that green banner at the very top. One of the things I mentioned earlier is Ignition's flexible licensing. That trial mode, timer counting down from two hours is built into the Ignition platform. Anybody can download Ignition and run their gateway on this two-hour trial license where all of the core modules are fully functioning and we can build our reports, build our notification pipelines, build all of our displays and our HMIs all on this trial license. And when that two-hour timer goes up, we just go back to the gateway and reset it. Now, what we're doing right now, Aryanna is about to restore a gateway back up, which is in our downloads folder. And we're doing this to basically set up a few preliminary environmental points for our project.

07:25
Jayson Thorpe: And while this is going, let's also install the designer launcher. Now, the reason we're uploading a gateway back up is like I said, we have some project resources already built, some data points in the form of tags. And as this designer launcher is installing, me and Aryanna are gonna switch places, hot potato, and she's gonna take you through the designer once it's fully installed.

07:55
Aryanna Brown: Thank you, JT. Once we have our gateway up and running, we'll take a quick little tour and I'll show you what we've got going on in this back up.

08:11
Jayson Thorpe: Now, one thing to know is during or right now, we're not pointing to any gateways, but right now we have our launcher local to our Gateway, but Aryanna is gonna go into what are the different options for anyone on your network that may need to use the designer.

08:31
Aryanna Brown: So now that we have restored our gateway back up, let's take a look at what's in it. If we head over to the status page, like JT just showed you, log in, we're gonna see that we have some tags. Some of these I've created, we have two device connections, two programmable device simulators, so that when we show our demonstration, we can get started right away with real live unique values. And then, we have a database connection, and that database connection is for us to show trends. And as you see here, the throughput is about 0.8 queries per second, so this will show you the status of your database connection, and right now, it's healthy. I also have a partially built project in this back up that we'll go ahead and take a look at closer in the designer. First, we're gonna wanna launch our designer launcher. Now that we have this open, we're gonna go ahead and add our designer. Now, notice we have two tabs, one is on your network and the other is manual. Manual will allow you to input your Gateway URL manually should it not appear under the on your network tab. The on your network tab is gonna show you all of the Gateways it recognizes on your current network.

09:52
Aryanna Brown: Right now, it's only ours, so we're gonna go ahead and select our Gateway. Once we've selected our Gateway, we're gonna go ahead and open our designer for this Gateway, which should list all of the projects that we have configured for this Gateway. Once we get this open, we'll take a quick tour of the designer, and then we'll get started in showing you a Vision client runtime application.

10:23
Jayson Thorpe: Now Aryanna, how many designer sessions can we be running concurrently from the same Gateway?

10:27
Aryanna Brown: You can run as many as you'd like. As long as you can connect to it through your network, both I and JT can be working on the same project at the same time, if we'd like.

10:38
Jayson Thorpe: All right, I'm just gonna sign in here.

10:45
Aryanna Brown: Perfect. Now, we only have one project on this gateway, but you can create projects for each device, each substation, whichever you prefer. Now that we have our designer open, it is so pretty. Look at it. The possibilities are endless. If we head to the top left-hand corner, you'll notice our project browser, this is gonna list our various modules that can be configurable within the designer, such as our reporting module, which will auto-generate PDF reports to email, saving a directory, even print. We also have our visualization modules, Vision Perspective, scripting, any module that is configurable in the designer. Under that, you'll see we have our tag browser. In our tag browser, we have two tabs, one is tags, the other is UDT definitions with a drop down above it, to select our tag provider. UDT definitions provide a single structure of tags that map to unique data points in your server or device. If you notice we have one for compressor and one for sensor.

11:57
Aryanna Brown: Now, earlier, I mentioned our programmable device simulators, those are coming from a dairy. So these sensor UDTs are representing a refrigerator, humidity and temperature. If we head over to the tags tab, you'll see that we have real-time instances of these definitions. So we have one for each of our compressors and each of our sensors. Now that we've taken a quick little tour, I'm gonna go ahead and launch a Vision client runtime application to show you guys what operators or end users would typically see. While that's loading, I'm just gonna go ahead and show you guys. I've created a template here, notice that it says sensor three, I've only created one of these, this is a resource that we can use to dynamically create multiple instances for a given device or data type. We're gonna go ahead and log in just as operators or end users would. And this is our overview page. Notice that we have those sensor, three of our sensor templates in our overview page.

13:18
Aryanna Brown: Now, I did not create three different sensor templates, I created one and then parameterized them so that I can put in sensor one, sensor two, sensor three to give me those unique real-time values for each of those sensors. With this functionality, that means we can also read and write to and from these UDTs, and we can switch back and forth and see the unique values that these UDTs give us. Now we're gonna head over to our alarms page and let you check out some alarms. Oh, oh. We don't see any alarms. That's okay, let's head back to our designer and we're gonna configure an alarm on our UDT definition so that it takes on every single real-time instance. Now that we're in our UDT definition, we're gonna head to our sensor UDT, down to our humidity tag. Once we're in our humidity tag, we're gonna go down to alarms and add a brand new alarm, we're gonna give it a fun name, like humidity high alarm. Once we've given it a fun name, we're gonna modify the display path. Now, the display path is how it will be displayed in an alarm status table, an alarm journal table, it's exactly as described, how you would like it to display for that instance of the alarm.

14:50
Aryanna Brown: We're going to be using Ignition's expression language to dynamically create these display paths so that they are unique to each of their instances and alarms. Once we hit apply, we're gonna go down and let it know when we'd like the alarm to go active. Given that this is humidity, let's go ahead and make it 95. Once we hit Apply and Okay, you'll notice that we get alarms for each of our sensors. Look under the display path, we have this sensor one, sensor two and sensor three, I only had to configure that once and it dynamically created my display paths. Now, if you head back to the designer, you'll notice under our tags tab, each of our real-time instances for these sensors have the alarming icon showing that there is an alarm configured for each of these tags. Now we're gonna head back to our runtime application and take a look at some tag history. Oh, no. Same issue. That's okay. Just the way we modified a global resource to show you how we can get alarms, we're gonna now modify a project resource to get our tag history displayed.

16:16
Aryanna Brown: We're gonna head over to our history window, and if you notice on the left-hand side in that tag browser, there's this little clock looking icon, that means that history has been configured on these tags and they are currently storing tag history. So we're gonna go ahead and just drag and drop both of them on to our easy chart component, and now we have some values. Now, it is not... Oh, let's go ahead and take a look at it in the client. That was very quick. Easily deployable. Now it's not expected that operators be able to drag and drop. If you look here, if we get rid of this, they can no longer add them back, so we're gonna head to the designer and add a component so that operators can have the same functionality in their project client runtime that we have in our designer.

17:11
Aryanna Brown: We have a tag browse tree component that we're going to be using, and it is exactly as described. It's gonna allow us to browse our tags within our runtime application, so we do not need access to our designer tag browser. We're gonna make it pretty and formatted. And then, once we've done that, we're gonna modify the Tag Tree mode. Now, this is important because the Tag Tree mode will just differentiate between real-time tag paths and historical tag paths. Historical tag paths are tag paths that have been historized for tags that are currently storing history or have stored history. Now that we've changed that to Historical tag paths, operators can only select tags that have history. So we're gonna go ahead and hit save and watch this automatically deploy to our client. And if we get rid of our tag pens, our operators can easily drag and drop tag history onto their chart. Now, that I've gone through Vision and a client runtime application and showing you how to visualize that, JT is going to show you how to build a similar application in our Perspective module.

18:31
Jayson Thorpe: Thank you, Aryanna. So quickly, we've seen how we can manage our tags or manage the tags that are giving us the data from our devices using UDTs, make a change in one place. We see that change populate out to all of our instances. The UDTs that are giving us the real-time tag values are actually pointed to our PLCs. We made an update to one of the interfaces of our Vision client as well, and we deployed that instantaneously. And now, we're gonna go and do something similar in our other visualization module Perspective. For that, we just got word that our organization has bought some new motors. We bought some new hardware. It's installed. We have those connected through our OPC server. We're getting values from our motors in the form of tags through our OPC server. What we're gonna do here is go and design a UDT to match the motor structure in our OPC server. So we're gonna make a new data type.

19:29
Aryanna Brown: Oops, gotta go to that tab.

19:31
Jayson Thorpe: Ah, there we go.

19:33
Jayson Thorpe: In the UDT definitions tab, we're gonna create a new UDT. We're gonna call this motor and we do need to give it a parameter so that we can take the addresses for the PLCs or registers for each individual data point, tell it which motor we want to view, and we are able to redirect our OPC item paths across our server. What you see Aryanna doing here now is browsing our OPC server looking directly onto our devices for the different data points. You'll see we have at least eight different motors. All of these have an identical structure of the same two tags. This is why we're building a UDT, so that we don't have to build a new set of tags for each individual motor. We're just gonna add two of those into our UDT and then using our parameter for the motor number and Ignition's expression language, we're gonna plug in the parameter in place of that motor number to create a dynamic OPC address. Excellent. Now, we have our UDT defined. We have the two data points for every motor we're gonna want to view. And now we need to create our real-time instances, which we can do quickly with one of my favorite names in Ignition, the Instance Creation Wizard. We just have to tell it which UDT we would like to create instances of, give it a base name and pattern for the name and the parameters. When through, check that name tag name pattern.

21:13
Aryanna Brown: Oh, thank you.

21:13
Jayson Thorpe: Whew.

21:16
Jayson Thorpe: Very nice. Now, as soon as we hit Okay, we're gonna see eight instances of our motors. And using that parameter, each one is actually giving us a different value from our devices. Awesome. Now, we have the data actually coming into our system. In order to display this data, we wanna go to Perspective and start building some displays and interfaces. We're gonna build a view to not only show us information for each one of our motors, but also to be able to change the state of that motor to be able to turn it on off. So we're making a new view called motor view. We are gonna use a flex container, which in Perspective, one of the main considerations is the different sizes of screens that your sessions will be run on. What devices are your operators gonna be using? Perspective is chockfull of different layout options to be able to gracefully display your session on different device, specifically different screen sizes. And the flex container handles scaling of the components pretty nicely.

22:24
Jayson Thorpe: Now, so that we know which motor we are viewing, we're gonna add a label component here. And once again, using Ignition's expression language, which very easily can let you take different values from across your system to generate a single value, that's really where the expression language strength lies. In this case that one value we want to generate is just a string of text.

22:50
Aryanna Brown: We forgot to create a parameter.

22:52
Jayson Thorpe: Yes, we did. In order for this label to dynamically display, we do need a parameter just like our UDT definitions. There we go. Very nice. And after this label, we're gonna go and... Well, let's finish configuring this label here first. Now, since we've added the parameter, we can easily go and browse any of the properties across this view of all the components. Right now, the one we want is that motor number parameter. Just so this view is a little bit more interesting to look at, we're gonna go into the symbol factory, which is a library of scaled vector graphic images built into Ignition for us to use in our projects here. We have a simple motor four that looks pretty nice, but now we need to get the components to not only see the value of some of our motor tags, but also to be able to control the state of them. We have an HOA tag that we're gonna use to turn our motors on and off. So we're gonna grab a multi-state button for that, which lets us view and send out a read or... Sorry, a write to a tag.

24:02
Jayson Thorpe: So we're gonna go and use that parameter to once again set up an indirect binding, this time directly to any of our motor tags. Once we switch out the motor number with our dynamic parameter and make this binding bidirectional so that we can not only get that value and see it, but also send a signal back to the tag from this component. We need the same binding on this other property to indicate a value. So we're just copying the binding, pasting that real quick. And let's go into preview mode in the designer and turn on read and write mode. And let's see that motor one HOA tag change value now. Excellent. And all we have to do is change the value of that parameter to point to a different motor, but I think we've proven the point. Now let's get an LED display to actually see how much current's running through our amp or through our motors. And then, we're gonna go and quickly get this displayed over into our session. For this LED display component, we just have to once again bind to any of our tags using our parameter, we can dynamically redirect our view instances.

25:23
Jayson Thorpe: All right. Now, we have all of the information for our motors displayed. We're gonna go and create one more view, and we're gonna load that up with a few different displays to show to our users depending on the size of the screen they're viewing our session on. We're using a Breakpoint Container here. Remember I said Perspective's all about displaying your session on different screen sizes. The Breakpoint Container has two Subcon Containers. One will display when we're beneath a certain width, width being the container or the size of the screen being displayed on. And for the small view for when our operators are on their mobile devices, we're gonna use a carousel component for this. Carousel component, we've all seen it's equivalent on various webpages. Something that just takes an image or a set of cards can swipe them horizontally.

26:23
Jayson Thorpe: We're gonna load up this carousel component with different instances of our motor view. You can see here Aryanna is just telling our carousel, which view we want to embed, setting a unique value for that parameter. And just like that, we have four instances of four of our motor devices coming in through our OPC server. And now, we have to build out the large view. What are the users gonna see when they're on a, when they're viewing our session on a monitor or a wide screen. For that, we have a tab container. Tab container also has multiple sub-containers that can display on demand. For this tab container, we're just gonna deep select this container here, and we have two views in the learning Ignition fundamentals folder that we pre-built for this demonstration. And we're just taking those views and embedding them directly into this tab container. And then here, Aryanna is just adding more views. She's gonna name those tabs something useful. And then, we're gonna go and get this view right into our session as a webpage.

27:50
Jayson Thorpe: All right. So, I don't know if anybody's been timing me, but how long has it taken us since we started building our UDT? 10 minutes? Maybe maybe about 13. We're about to take all of that work and get it all in front of the people that need to see it. All of our operators running our session. So, let's see. Oh, view can't do...

28:08
Aryanna Brown: The tab containers.

28:08
Jayson Thorpe: That itself?

28:09
Aryanna Brown: Yeah. I'm not sure, it's embedded.

28:14
Jayson Thorpe: Delete that?

28:15
Aryanna Brown: Yeah. Okay. Here. And drag and drop.

28:22
Jayson Thorpe: There we go.

28:35
Aryanna Brown: Well, we may need to only have alarms stick.

28:38
Jayson Thorpe: Yeah, but deep select it.

28:39
Aryanna Brown: I do.

28:40
Jayson Thorpe: Let's try one more time. Interesting.

28:45
Aryanna Brown: I think it's the view itself.

28:47
Jayson Thorpe: Yeah. Oh, I see.

28:48
Aryanna Brown: Yeah.

28:49
Jayson Thorpe: It did drop it inside itself. Okay, cool. So delete it from there.

28:52
Aryanna Brown: Oh, there it is.

28:55
Jayson Thorpe: There we go.

28:55
Aryanna Brown: There we go. There we go.

28:57
Jayson Thorpe: Now when we go to the Tab Container, perfect. There we go.

29:00
Aryanna Brown: Okay.

29:02
Jayson Thorpe: All right. Slight setback happens to the best of us. Now, let's go to our page configuration. We have all these different views, all of the different displays built, but not all of these are gonna appear in our session. This is where we manage which pages are accessible in our session, which pages are exposed via URL in our session, and what pages are navigable too. Here we're just taking our homepage, that forward slash root URL, pointing it to the overview view that we just built. As soon as we save our project and launch our session we'll see the fruits of our labor here. Here we see the large screen version where we can switch back and forth between alarms and history. And we're gonna use the developer tools in Chrome just to simulate a smaller screen here where we not only see the small view that we built with all of our motors, but can you go make that a little bit smaller again and show off that flex container doing its work.

30:03
Jayson Thorpe: Notice how when we're narrower, the Flex Container is scaling up and down for us. These are just a couple of options in Perspective to handle graceful layout scaling for different types of devices. And that does end our demonstration for today. We're about to take questions here, but we didn't even get a chance to look at, take a deep dive into that is of the reporting module, alarm notifications, things that not only get realtime data in front of people that need to see it, but also that historical data, things like reports, calculations, MES downtimes, but also getting that historical and aggregated data in front of those who need to see it as well. Thank you.

30:51
Aryanna Brown: That concludes our session. Thank you for coming.

31:01
Jayson Thorpe: And now we do have a microphone walking around the room if there are any questions. We have 15 minutes for questions, everyone. Yes. Right down here.

31:09
Audience Member 1: What's the difference between Vision...

31:10
Jayson Thorpe: Sorry. We will ask you to wait for the microphone because we are streaming or this will be... It's either being viewed live. It is.

31:19
Audience Member 1: What's the difference between Vision and Perspective?

31:22
Jayson Thorpe: Biggest difference is one, the Vision client's gonna run as a Java client in kind of the more client-host relationship. The biggest difference with Perspective is different screen sizes. You run Perspective session in a web browser, any device that can get online, access a web browser can run a Perspective session. This is not the case with Vision.

31:45
Aryanna Brown: They also run separately. Perspective runs on the gateway whereas Vision clients will run on the machine that they're launched from.

31:53
Jayson Thorpe: True. Any other questions? I know everyone's all hyped on 8.3...

32:00
Aryanna Brown: I know.

32:02
Jayson Thorpe: From that keynote. Yeah. In the back in the middle.

32:09
Audience Member 2: I saw on the 8.3 feature keynote, Rockwell and Siemens S7 I/O drivers. What are the other standard drivers that are included?

32:24
Jayson Thorpe: Let's go. Well, you know what? You can come talk to us after. I mean, we could show you on the Gateway right now. Actually, let's do that. Let's show you. Well, one of the things is different, the drivers that come standard on the gateway are for Siemens, Allen-Bradley, even Legacy versions of both of those different ones here we can see the drivers that just come standard on fresh out of the box install, but different vendors make different drivers as well. So there are very few devices that you're not able to connect to directly. But even if you can't, the fact that Ignition acts as an OPC server means that whatever OPC server you do have connected to those devices, Ignition's gonna still connect to that.

33:06
Audience Member 2: Very good. Thank you.

33:10
Audience Member 3: JT, I don't see a module for MQTT.

33:15
Jayson Thorpe: MQTT is a separate module. That one is available as a few different modules. We have the...

33:22
Aryanna Brown: Engine distributor and the broker. We also have the transmission. So if you are looking for those modules, you're definitely gonna have to go to a Cirrus Link. And they're technically a third party module, but we work very closely with them. So they won't be available to you on the actual Inductive Automation website, but we will help you support it.

33:44
Jayson Thorpe: Yeah.

33:46
Audience Member 4: How many active or consecutive sessions can you have? Is there a difference between Vision and Perspective? What's the payload? How heavy is it against the Gateway?

34:00
Aryanna Brown: So Vision, like I said earlier, that they're gonna be ran on the machines that they're launched from. So truthfully, if you have kind of a heavier project that's gonna be more intense, you have to make sure each machine that is launching that application for Vision can handle that. In Perspective though, it's in a web browser, so since it runs on the Gateway, if there are performance type issues, it's dependent on your gateway and the specs of the machine that your gateway is hosted on and what you gave your gateway. So truthfully, it's kind of endless. You can give it as many resources as you want, as long as your machine can handle it, go crazy.

34:40
Jayson Thorpe: The key is that the license, the Ignition license is never gonna limit you on how many databases you can connect to how many devices or OPC servers or how many concurrent runtimes of Vision or Perspective or designers. You can have as many going of all of those as you want in any combination. The license is never gonna restrict that for you. Yes, thank you.

35:02
Audience Member 5: If you're new to Ignition, where would you suggest you start to get in to get a good introduction and learn about the system?

35:09
Aryanna Brown: This is a great question.

35:11
Jayson Thorpe: We have... Well, sorry, you say I'll show.

35:14
Aryanna Brown: I'm glad you were going to it right away because I'm sure we were thinking the same thing. Inductive University, it is a great, great tool. New hires use it with us just to get them started. So I highly, highly recommend it to get you guys started as well.

35:33
Jayson Thorpe: So yeah, you can download it really quickly and get started with it really quickly and using this free library of video tutorials, you don't even have to log in to watch all of these, but if you log in, you can take challenges and build towards a credential here in the Inductive University. But essentially, this is almost a whole course on getting started with Ignition and being able to do some really cool stuff with it without even having to open the user manual or even attending a class. And all of this is for free, Inductive University. Yes. Down. Yeah. I see you.

36:02
Audience Member 6: Yeah. So you showed a toolbox earlier with like check boxes and then the carousel.

36:08
Jayson Thorpe: Oh. Yeah.

36:09
Audience Member 6: Can advanced users make their own, like software developers? Can they make their own controls and visualizations?

36:16
Aryanna Brown: Oh, like components?

36:17
Audience Member 6: Yes.

36:19
Aryanna Brown: I don't believe so.

36:22
Jayson Thorpe: And I've seen some pretty interesting things done with Java Swing, but that's like as a Java developer.

36:28
Aryanna Brown: I would think if you created your own module at that point you could do whatever with it. But I don't believe you can create your own components. We do allow, if you search through our forums and our community third party resources to allow to get in there and kind of modify what you can but not necessarily create components from scratch.

36:50
Jayson Thorpe: Those people that, some folks that do have that skillset to develop modules, if a lot of folks share those modules with each other on the Ignition Exchange, there's a lot of free user made resources here. And a lot of stuff that we've put out actually via Inductive Automation has put some stuff really cool modules on here. Anything from modules to project resources, a lot of that is done by other folks and the community is really great about sharing and caring.

37:21
Audience Member 6: Okay. Thank you.

37:22
Jayson Thorpe: Yeah, absolutely. And then, oh, over there and then this gentleman right here.

37:26
Audience Member 7: On the Inductive University, is there a way to monitor the process of people that you have assigned to go there to learn?

37:36
Jayson Thorpe: I think you can track this on your user portal through your organization portal. Yes. Cool. So that is trackable on your organization's portal.

37:47
Audience Member 8: I think users almost do.

37:48
Jayson Thorpe: Oh, okay. Cool. Thank you.

37:51
Audience Member 9: So, speaking of the Exchange, the project you guys just showed, is that on the Exchange for download, or we're gonna check out later?

37:58
Aryanna Brown: It is not.

38:00
Jayson Thorpe: No, but that's not a bad idea actually. Maybe we'll have to see if...

38:02
Audience Member 9: Maybe kind of study it, kind of get better understanding.

38:04
Jayson Thorpe: Yeah. That's not a bad idea. One thing you can do though, let's see, if we go and start a new project, if we went to go and create a new project right now, there are template projects included in the Gateway as well. So, you can just, for example, like Vision tab Nav, that's gonna create a project with some tab navigation already built in Vision, Perspective has similar ones. So you can actually just write a white out of the box installation, get some prebuilt resources to start playing around with some kind of like what we did here.

38:36
Audience Member 9: Brilliant. All right. Thank you.

38:38
Jayson Thorpe: You're very welcome. Oh, down here. Thank you.

38:46
Audience Member 10: So when you were showing the changing parameters and how easy that was, on a qualified system for like life sciences, is all of that audit trail, is everything on your audit trail that you make changes to just to ensure that once you're on a qualified system, anything that changes, you can go back and...

39:05
Aryanna Brown: Yes. So, we have an audit log. Now, not everything is logged in that audit log as of right now. But if you head to our manual page, it will list everything that is and you will at least be able to see who went into the project and how they changed it. If they changed the project, it will say like, project modification and who it was, it may not necessarily tell you exactly what it is they did. But anything that's more gateway scoped, it will tell you. So, if they wrote to a tag, if they modified a tag, if they actually modified the tag, it'll tell you that. Things that are more project resource-based, it doesn't, it's kind of hit or miss on what it will actually log right now.

39:46
Jayson Thorpe: The designer doesn't really track exact changes to like, in every individual component, but you will be able to see who logged in, who did save any changes. And even with scripting built in throughout and some extension functions or sorry, system functions people set up their own logging pretty effortlessly through the scripting that's already built into Ignition as as well.

40:06
Aryanna Brown: There's a scripting function to write to our audit log.

40:10
Jayson Thorpe: Exactly. So anything that that audit log doesn't cover, you can probably cook something up as well to make sure it does. Back there in the back.

40:19
Audience Member 11: Yeah. Is there a cross reference browser for your graphics and tags and everything?

40:22
Jayson Thorpe: A cross reference browser? I'm not sure what you mean by that.

40:26
Audience Member 11: Finding out where your templates are used.

40:29
Aryanna Brown: Oh, so like a find and replace type? Yeah, we do. We have a find and replace tool within the designer. And you can put in like a keyword of what you're looking for and it'll pop up and list everything that, whether it's a property binding, a component of you, a window name.

40:45
Jayson Thorpe: Script.

40:46
Aryanna Brown: Script as long as you kind of know a keyword, it'll try to find it within your project. So yes.

40:54
Jayson Thorpe: And that's one of those things that every couple versions there is something new to make managing the various moving pieces of your projects a lot easier. That's not necessarily new, but every couple versions there's something that lets you find things in your projects a little easier.

41:12
Aryanna Brown: Yes.

41:16
Audience Member 12: So with 8.3 coming out pretty soon beta, will there be videos posted on university that kind of goes over the new features to kind of get a start on learning that stuff? Like the drawing tools for instance?

41:27
Jayson Thorpe: Not right when it's released, but we absolutely are going to start you know, coming from the training department, we wanna be able to teach people. People are gonna wanna know how to use it. We want to teach people how to use it. We absolutely are gonna be building resources to learn Ignition 8.3 as soon as we can.

41:43
Aryanna Brown: It may not be immediately available, but.

41:44
Audience Member 12: Okay. That's fine. Will the docs be a good place to start to kind of see that stuff kind of comes...

41:49
Jayson Thorpe: Absolutely.

41:49
Audience Member 12: Through later on to just get that information as soon as possible?

41:52
Aryanna Brown: Absolutely. Yes.

41:52
Audience Member 12: Okay. Perfect. Thank you.

41:53
Aryanna Brown: Yes.

41:57
Jayson Thorpe: One more.

41:58
Audience Member 13: I saw that you had to log in when you launch each of the individuals, if you are tied to Active Directory LDAP, can you configure it so that it's gonna take the user who's logged into that machine?

42:10
Aryanna Brown: Oh, so that it automatically, yeah, like Windows authentication type thing? Yeah.

42:15
Jayson Thorpe: Indeed.

42:20
Aryanna Brown: Any other questions?

42:22
Jayson Thorpe: If you are raising... Oh, down here in front.

42:23
Aryanna Brown: Oh, all right.

42:27
Jayson Thorpe: We would like for the mic just so it's available in the recording.

42:31
Audience Member 14: You kind of touched on the driver support, but do you guys support OPC, all the flavors like DA, A&C Alarms and Events, all those different versions? And then on top of that bus protocols, like is there a means in which to get PROFIBUS, PROFINET, fieldbus? There was some talk earlier about HARP through a third party, but...

42:47
Aryanna Brown: I'm not entirely too sure, but I can find out for you if you come talk to me...

42:51
Audience Member 14: All right.

42:51
Aryanna Brown: After the session.

42:55
Jayson Thorpe: Start in the back.

42:56
Audience Member 15: My question's around managing users and role capabilities. Currently we have single sign-on integrated with Azure Active Directory, and the way to manage that is inside of Azure. We make a user a member of a group and that gives, is that the only way to assign privileges and access to inside Ignition? Or are there other ways?

43:21
Jayson Thorpe: So typically, when you do use a service like that, as an identity provider or I guess a user source, there's usually options for like a hybrid management where you, if the permissions allow, potentially make a change to the user in the gateway and then that would update the source of truth. That as an option for most config for most implementations of user sources like that. All right. If you're raising your hand, and we don't see you, wave it around, please. All right. Well, thank you so much everyone. We will be here if you wanna talk to us at all. Thank you. We won't keep you here anymore.

44:05
Aryanna Brown: Good job. Good job, dude.

44:06
Jayson Thorpe: Right back at you.