Inductive Automation Blog

Ignition supports resilient architectures with features such as built-in redundancy and failover, store-and-forward to maintain data integrity, and support for edge computing and MQTT to enable decentralized processing and reduce reliance on central servers.

In the automation world, the Purdue Model (also known as the Purdue reference model, Purdue network model, ISA 95, or the Automation Pyramid) is a well-known architectural framework for industrial control systems (ICS).

Learn more about our networking and automation portfolio as a complement to Ignition. We will showcase our PLCnext technology with Modular I/O, Ethernet switches, and new MQTT / MODBUS protocol converter products. We will introduce you to new upcoming technologies based on Single Pair Ethernet and APL. 

Transcript:

00:00
Arnold Offner: Hi there. My name is Arnold Offner, and this will be my very first presentation to you Ignition system integrators, end users, and partners. It's just recently that Phoenix Contact became a member of the Inductive Alliance Partner Program, and so my presentation today will not include a true demonstration of product as such, but I wanted to talk to you about some of the examples of some of the work we've already been doing with the Ignition software package. I wanted to thank you all for coming to this presentation. At least I was not holding you up from lunch, and I'm glad you took the time after lunch to be here this afternoon. At Phoenix Contact we're actually a German-headquartered company, but there are a lot of similarities between ourselves and Inductive Automation. If you look at the idea that they're family-owned, privately held, and they essentially have grown organically just like we have. Here in the US, we're about 1000 people. You probably know us for terminal blocks, those green terminal blocks that you find on a lot of electronics out there. You probably know us for power supplies and relays, but our real connection with Inductive Automation and the Ignition software package is related to the hardware that I would call networking and automation.

01:19
Arnold Offner: And so in my presentation today, I wanted to show you some of those examples, but more importantly, I wanted to give you an outlook into where our partnership is gonna go and how that might benefit applications of yours in the future because I've heard people talk about the IIoT, I've heard people talk about applications that might involve the edge, and what I wanted to share with you today is some of the work that I'm doing at Phoenix Contact that involves, I think, a technology that will be very interesting for you towards the end of my presentation. And then Marcus will run around with the microphone towards the end, and he'll get to see if there's any other questions you have at the end of my presentation. So we're good to start. You signed up for 30 minutes, so I'm gonna try and respect your time and make sure that this works for both of us. So at Phoenix Contact we talk about enabling the Digital Transformation. This actually is a campus picture of our headquarters in Germany, but we actually, shall we say, essentially, except for my accent, which you'll note didn't come from the US, came from way south of here.

02:21
Arnold Offner: We actually have a campus; this is our main campus in Blomberg, Germany. It essentially services our global operations but what it also does at the same time it allows us here in the US to actually, what we would say, think global but act local. In other words, a lot of my colleagues that you'll ever get to be meeting here in the US market or whichever market you're in, you will find that they are essentially local people who understand the local markets. I'm involved in development and manufacturing, and like I say, it's about this idea of the Digital Transformation; it's about automation; it's about networking. So now I'm gonna make sure that the clicker works. And it doesn't. Okay. I'll tell you what we'll do.

03:05
Arnold Offner: We'll do it the other way. Alright. So this, just to give you an idea, is the web interface that we've set up at Phoenix Contact, and if you come to our small booth outside in the hallway, you'll get to see two things that we're actually demonstrating. We've used the Ignition software package to show essentially our customers, yourselves, but to allow our salespeople just to tell a customer, "Hey, if you type in iiot.phoenixcontact.com, we will actually give you a sampling of some of the things we're working on right now." On this lower purple line, you'll notice that actually is our current, and this is just a screenshot, so it's not live; it actually is our solar installation that we have at our facility in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. And then we also have about 18 electric vehicle employee charging stations.

04:00
Arnold Offner: And so we actually just run a very little interesting number each day. We basically think that about four miles is possible with one kilowatt of electric energy in an electric vehicle. And so that's where we come up with 550 miles of... miles that we've charged employees that have an electric vehicle in the employee fleet in Harrisburg. We have about 800 people in our facility in Harrisburg, so product marketing, sales coordination, design and manufacturing, and logistics. And then scattered around the country another 250 salespeople who are responsible for either customers or particular industries around the contiguous US. So one of the exciting reference projects that I did wanna mention, and you'll find more of this on YouTube if you go looking for it, involves a project we did last year, and actually last year and the year before, but it was successfully deployed during the course of early last year. It's with a hydro plant up close to Boise, Idaho, known as the Lucky Peak Hydro Power Plant. Derek Stone is one of the gentlemen who is actually very closely involved with this project together with our team, and we actually have two Gold Certified Ignition Software Engineers at our facility in Pennsylvania, which means they actually wrote a lot of the code that then helped the folks at Lucky Peak actually deploy Ignition together with our hardware in the upgrade that they were deploying in their facility near Boise, Idaho.

05:29
Arnold Offner: What I will tell you is there's two videos, and then there's also a set of articles that were written that actually discuss how the Phoenix Contact hardware together with the Inductive Automation software came to be, how this upgrade took place. So as part of my agenda for today, like I said, I really wanted to just talk to you about the things that we're displaying here to add to products you might already know from us, and I'm gonna save that one right at the end there for last. Like I said, Phoenix Contact back in 2017 launched a controller we know as PLCnext. It is a very interesting PLC because it's not your custom PLC. It's based and predicated around a Linux controller. In other words, it's based entirely on the Yocto platform. And what it allows customers to do is we develop software that allows you to use the typical IEC 61131 software programs, but it also allows you to write your own code. And so if you're best in class or you have a certain skill set, either as a programmer or as a company, it's also possible for you then to develop software code that you could then sell through a PLCnext store that we've created to go with it. I'm gonna cover a little bit of the Ethernet switch technology and then talk about protocol converters, but really my key discussion for today is to tell you about how we're very soon gonna be able to get into this space as well.

06:53
Arnold Offner: And that technology is gonna be based on what I wanted to share with you in a moment called Ethernet APL and SPE. And so that is Ethernet APL is predicated around its usage in the process industry, the heavy process industry, and SPE; if you've not heard about it so far, it actually is called... It's single-pair Ethernet. And single-pair Ethernet is gonna allow you to go 1000 meters, so 3280 feet. It's gonna allow you to essentially take 10 megabits of data all the way to devices. And some of the technology that I'll show you in a moment actually just stands to benefit from this capability. And then towards the end, I might still have a chance to then tell you some of the raffle prize winners of people who may have stopped by our booth already and some of the raffle prizes we have to give away. So the area of application where we get involved could be considered to be these five. Phoenix Contact is very well known in the factory automation space. So what we would consider production logistics, everything there, machinery, network machinery. If you then take a look further up to the side here, you'll see infrastructure. So we've done a lot of projects with customers that involve ports, harbors, pipelines.

08:07
Arnold Offner: We've been very much involved in the area of power plants, so the IEC 61850. And when I talk about networking, also realize that part of our portfolio also includes cybersecurity. So we also have capabilities to allow people to log in remotely to equipment, plant, machinery, and basically extract data without having to physically send a person there. And this is very important too if you consider that Germany as such is an export-led country, so a lot of technology that our customers buy from us in Germany that gets exported to other countries. It's a very expensive proposition to send a technician out to find out that the power cord was unplugged, and that's the reason why the machine's not working. It'd be good to know that ahead of time, and then also know what parts you need to take with you if you get called away to a site somewhere else across the globe. Phoenix Contact is probably best known for its products that were originally defined in, when electricity became a big thing in the '20s and '30s. And so our terminal blocks actually go back that far, in other words, to the time when electricity and electric trams, and this is even before the motor car became an essential, I think, part of everyone's life globally.

09:20
Arnold Offner: Then of course we're talking machines and systems, so whether it's logistics, whether it's going to be containerized packages, and the part that is not quite clearly shown here that I'd refer to in area number four is we also do a lot of work in the water, wastewater. And slowly but surely we're also starting to invest more and more effort right now into the oil and gas, the chemical industry, and that's the team that I'm involved with here in the US. So we've actually been set up in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, as a center of competence for the process industry, and that is why a lot of the process-related products that I'm about to talk to you about today come from the work that the team, the development team, and the manufacturing team we have in Harrisburg is involved with. So with that, I wanted to first show you a product portfolio that we started in about the 2016-2017 timeframe. This is also a pointer, right? So I wanted to let you know we've developed an IO-Link Master, in other words, a device that allows us to connect independently using an Ethernet port to an IO-Link infrastructure. There is somebody already who's come to talk to us about a module we created, which was a serial gateway, but actually not a serial gateway; it's an Ethernet-based gateway which allows us to extract HART data from a HART installation.

10:41
Arnold Offner: So customers are revisiting their HART devices in the field, and those critically important ones we can actually extract that data off the side without compromising the performance of the plant. And then over to the very left is a set of four different families of products that we have, and I'm just gonna basically not belabor all the different types of protocols. Save to tell you that this is where we take a serial communication and we convert it to Ethernet, and the moment we can convert it to Ethernet, there's a lot of creativity that all of you could come up with to then deploy this into an Ignition-based package or a solution for your customers. The one important one that's exciting for us this week is we are doing a little bit of a soft launch this week about an MQTT protocol converter that we've created, which essentially is available in a form factor of one of those four. Two of those are actually raffle prizes, and essentially what we're doing is we are taking Modbus TCP or RTU and then either through a single port or through a dual port, which allows you to daisy chain things. You can then essentially take Modbus data and then convert that to MQTT along an Ethernet infrastructure. So those are the part numbers, and I know sometimes always people grab a cell phone and want to see part numbers, but that just to give you an idea of the Ethernet port count and the part numbers.

12:10
Arnold Offner: And the ones I marked in bold are actually the two protocol converters we've actually set up as raffle prizes for today. Alright, so the most important thing that I did want to talk to you about revolves around this topic of the field level today. The slide, as you'll notice bottom left, refers to something called Akima. Akima is the world's largest process control and process automation trade show anywhere in the world. It's held every three years. And back in 2021 is when we first, during the lockdown, actually conducted a virtual event where we talked about the space in the process automation space that is still not Ethernet compliant. And this is where a currently serial bus or analog connectivity currently exists. You're all aware of 4-20 milliamp loops. You're probably all aware of things like HART. You're probably also aware of things like PROFIBUS PA or Foundation Fieldbus. And this little area has never really been, until now, an area, a domain that you could actually do with Ethernet. And roll on into a time now that I'll refer to you as well, is we now have a technology known as Ethernet APL.

13:20
Arnold Offner: So it is a derivative of the IEEE single-pair Ethernet specification. And what we've actually gone and done is we have created an intrinsically safe connection, which allows us to go 200 meters from a switch in two wire down to a field device. And what we're able to do now is essentially tell you that Ethernet is now possible all the way to the very edge in a process automation application, probably the most difficult ones to engineer. And using this technique, this is the very same technique we do with single-pair Ethernet. So everybody who's ever worked with 4-20 or with HART or with any of the field bus systems know it's always two wires. It's not four pairs. So what we've actually gone and done is we've taken the IEEE 802.3cg standard, which essentially allows 10 megabits a second over a distance of 1000 meters. So make that 1000 meters. I always have to be careful how I get this right, but 3280 feet. And what that would allow you to then do is essentially have a smart device in the field that now has an IP address, which essentially can become part of an Ethernet network. So single-pair Ethernet is something that you're gonna hear more and more about. And I think at Phoenix Contact, because we've developed both things in the SPE space or the APL space, APL is nothing more than an advanced physical layer for process applications. So you can put whatever Ethernet protocol on top of that that you want.

14:49
Arnold Offner: We're essentially now going to be able to tell you that going to the edge means going all the way to the field instrument. What this also means, of course, is that this technology is still gonna live side by side with 4-20 and HART. It's still gonna live side by side with Fieldbus techniques, but it is gonna allow you now to get very advanced instrumentation or actuating devices to be part of your infrastructure at far higher speeds. And 10 megabits a second, just so you know what we're talking about, 10 megabits per second means we are 10,000 times faster than HART. And it also means that we are 300 times faster than any Fieldbus system out there. So sometimes when I do this presentation for my colleagues, I say, "This is an industry that no longer is gonna have time for coffee breaks." So the APL project is based around work that was done by four very notable standards development organizations. You'll probably recognize those four logos across the top. The FieldCom group is responsible, of course, for foundation, Fieldbus, and the HART protocol. The ODVA, as you know, is responsible for Ethernet IP. We're a member there. We're also a member of the OPC UA because what you now have to realize, if you start talking things in a digital space, OPC UA is probably gonna become the future platform on how this data transfer occurs.

16:04
Arnold Offner: And then, of course, the PROFIBUS, PROFINET organization, which also has its strength and is pretty much the rest of the world. But there are applications here too in the US that we're aware of. So those four standards organizations got together, together with 12 well-known companies in the space. And essentially what we did was we created a standard, a physical layer, which is protocol agnostic. And then what happened is at the end of August of 2022, the project, as it started in 2018, four years later, was dissolved. And then these standards development organizations went back to their particular members to then develop this technology further so that each of them can now create an Ethernet-based protocol on top of this advanced physical layer. So some of these companies you will recognize too, either because they are producing DCS systems or because they are producing sensors and actuators, commonly already used in the process space, or companies like Phoenix Contact, who we consider... Who I would consider to be in the infrastructure space. In other words, we are using a Layer 2 managed switch technology to actually create an IT-to-OT combination, which allows us to use regular Ethernet on the north side and then use the OT capabilities of APL into the field.

17:23
Arnold Offner: You will see that this is also a group of competitors that collaborate very well, just like I would say Alliance partners do within ICC each week, or each year when we meet for this week. And then the other thing I wanted to share with you is just some of the standards that we've also created and some of the documentation we've created, which allows us to essentially also basically create the foundation for now other companies to get involved in the technology too. And so I think I'm speaking to a lot of people who are gonna deploy the technology, and so the one thing I would mention is there is also an APL engineering guideline, which would probably become very interesting for you in the future. It's about 100 pages long, but it essentially takes the technology and the technique we've used from 4-20 and HART, and essentially now using APL allows us now to actually allow people to actually start defining, to start specifying an APL infrastructure moving forward. We are also currently, this is the part we're wrapping up right now, we're currently in the process of doing APL conformance testing, so interoperability, but all of these manufacturers are currently in the stages of either getting final certification or on the stages of still making sure that they have their class 1, div 2 standards, that they can conform to IECX or ATEX or any kind of national standards.

18:42
Arnold Offner: There are some countries that still insist on doing things a little differently. I'm thinking of countries like the UK. I'm thinking of countries like China, Korea, Japan. Those standards for those particular markets are still basically the steps that these manufacturers, including us, still have to work on. But the technology is now here, and what I wanted to share with you is that the technology is gonna allow us to actually develop some very, very interesting new concepts moving forward. And so in this Digital Transformation, we finally now have Ethernet all the way to field devices. I just wanted to give you a picture that shows the collaboration that occurred at the Phoenix Contact booth in June of this year in Germany. So together with the companies ABB, together with Endress and Hauser, together with KROHNE, and then a valve controller company here called Samson, we actually physically showed how this is possible. And I always like to point out that if you look at this ring, you're looking at a layer 2 managed ring, all right, with redundancy integrated. It can either be done with copper, or we've also got two SFP ports, which allow us to do it over fiber. And then we're using our PLCnext actually as an edge gateway. So in other words, it's not actually in part of the process. We're using the graphics here of any DCS manufacturer.

19:56
Arnold Offner: Our success so far has been with ABB and Honeywell. We're currently working with companies like Yokogawa and with Siemens on Next. And essentially our PLCnext is really doing what we call the NOA, the NAMUR Open Architecture. So it actually is extracting all the other data that is supposed to then, that is possible... That can be accessed while this process is running. And just to give you an idea, all of these devices are essentially then also push buttons that we have on a demo. I don't have that demo here this week. But essentially it's to give you an idea that all of these devices are essentially IP-driven devices, IP-connected devices. And so we can actually get into all the other information that this device actually has that would otherwise be hidden or not be available real time in a HART or a Fieldbus type application. So what I was gonna do is then just show you where I see this happening. And so I do have an example just to give an idea of where this goes. If you were to take a Coriolis massflow meter, you are probably looking at over 480 seconds in HART to get a downloaded piece of data back from the device. So you send out the command, and now that information comes back. It's gonna chew up a lot of time.

21:11
Arnold Offner: So close to eight minutes. With PROFIBUS, it's gonna take just about three. So about 180 seconds. And then if you're looking at Ethernet APL, this can be done in 10 seconds. And to give an example of how this really works, I wanted to show you an example of how Vega does it. So Vega, and this is a very interesting comparison. You'll notice the cursor moving around here. We're actually trying to connect to a Vega device using HART, while at the same time we're watching an envelope curve here continually being updated every two seconds using APL. So you can imagine the new kinds of business cases and the new kinds of performance categories that could be created in here. And I'm sorry that I dragged this out for two minutes, but you'll notice this bar is still filling up. And so who knows whether the HART information you're ultimately gonna get when that bar closes is actually correct. Because this Vega device on this side using APL has been able to keep tabs on it every two seconds and give you data that is very, very current and very, very accurate. And so, like I said, my comment to my colleagues when I talk about the speed is there's no more time for coffee breaks. People who use HART, I think a lot of them know that whenever you send a HART command, it's always a good time to head to the coffee machine or to go take a bathroom break because you're never sure if it's gonna be done by the time you get back.

22:29
Arnold Offner: All right. And with that, I wanna leave you with a topology that is actually what I see us doing in the future. Phoenix Contact has actually developed an SPE device as well. Some of those first SPE-compatible field devices are now out there. There is a company in Germany called Jumo that's already created three different types of devices, which they demonstrated last year at a microbrewery. So they have an environmental sensor, which in one package over two wires and 1000 meters can actually give us the air quality in here, would give us a CO2 level, and would give us the humidity and temperature. They have another device that does pressure. They have another device that does flow. And then what I wanted to show you here is just the use of Ethernet APL again with a Phoenix Contact product. And all of these devices now could run out 200 meters to APL devices in the field. And so that's why I just want to show you is that we are gonna be part of this discussion moving forward as we essentially take this kind of technology to the edge. What you can also notice, and that's the beauty of a network, is you'll notice we are running a ring structure. We are running another series of Phoenix Contact PROFINET, Modbus TCP, OPC UA, or Ethernet IP type devices.

23:45
Arnold Offner: We can then run them to redundant control systems. And essentially that network now allows us to do all kinds of things. And if you would for a moment just imagine that SCADA could also be Ignition. But I feel Ignition could be also used in other parts of the plant because asset management now becomes very interesting too. In other words, it's up to now the creativity of yourselves as to how you would use Ignition on this backplane here to basically do the things related to the instrumentation here in the field. With that I was gonna just mention, I don't know, is Mark there?

24:22
Mark: Yeah.

24:23
Arnold Offner: Are you ready with the list, Mark?

24:25
Mark: I am.

24:30
Arnold Offner: Okay. Did you bring them with you as well, or are they at the table?

24:30
Mark: I brought them with me.

0:24:33.9
Arnold Offner: Alright. Five minutes, perfect. We've got five more minutes. So Mark is our local sales guy here. Thank you, Mark. Alright. So is Chris Bomarito in the audience? Nope. We'll catch up with you later. Sabrina Rodriguez in the audience?

24:54
Sabrina Rodriguez: Here.

24:54
Arnold Offner: Okay. We have a switch for you, an unmanaged switch. Is Bram Fenter here from Element 8? Nope. Justin Davies from DCI?

25:05
Justin Davies: Right here.

25:05
Arnold Offner: Okay. We have a product for you too. We're getting you a MQTT Modbus protocol converter. Is Dallas Ward from Sierra Controls here? Nope. We'll catch up with him in a moment. And then I'm looking for Ryan Birch from California Resources Corporation. Alright. We'll catch up with him later as well. Thank you. Alright. We'll catch up with you and provide you with all your samples in a moment. And with that, I was gonna let Marcus hand the microphone out to anybody who had any questions. And that leaves us with three minutes. Go ahead. Anybody have any questions? So there, I can go back to the slide. The current companies that produce the APL devices that I showed in the table, and I think there's maybe three or four that have been added to that list, have created an IP-based control system that runs on the two wires.

25:54
Mark: Okay. So...

25:54
Arnold Offner: The switch, in turn, can still, in this current configuration, because there is a project out there right now that everybody's scrambling to get their hands on, the switch that we have also has proxy functionality. So we can substitute, if the APL device is not yet ready, we can use a PROFIBUS PA device of the same type. But if you think about 4-20, if it's a 4-20 device, it probably didn't do much more. If it was a HART device or a Fieldbus device, it probably does more. And so to your question, I would say it's not as much a 4-20 as much as it is more of the sophisticated devices that those field device manufacturers have never really been able to get into the marketplace.

26:32
Arnold Offner: Hope that answers your question. Yeah. If you look at IO-Link, I would say complementary, only because IO-Link is predicated more towards the factory automation space. And IO-Link is actually working in two other spaces still. They are starting to do what they call IO-Link Wireless, and they're also creating what they call IO-Link Safety. Think about IO-Link as truly being something that gets used in the factory automation space, whereas APL and SPE are gonna be covering essentially that entire market space, so both the EX and the non-EX market. So, complementary. Yeah. The only challenge is with three wires, it doesn't tie in very nicely to the two. And I have seen companies already start working on media converters that will convert IO-Link to SPE. But then your challenge still is you're talking about a gateway, and we're trying to eliminate gateways. Because IO-Link is a master-slave type configuration, and so it doesn't really have a great way to connect into Ethernet networks above.

27:38
Audience Member 1: For device manufacturers, do you see a big adoption happening for this on the end devices?

27:43
Arnold Offner: I would say end devices, the adoption is probably gonna come from best-in-class device manufacturers who have always had a lot more intelligence inside the device. So if you looked at that name, you're probably looking at really high-end devices that these companies produce. I think the challenge in the SPE space is think about it more of being a combination of devices just over two wires. Because what I probably forgot to mention is that over my 1000 meters at 10 megabits a second, we're also pushing out power. So we're doing the same thing we do with 4-20, but we are actually sending out power. And those power categories are then also defined. I don't want to go into too much of the weeds on that, but essentially it's a powered two-wire system.

28:23
Audience Member 1: So outside the working group, obviously they're adopting, they're part of it, but do you see other companies looking at it, asking about it, trying to get involved?

28:32
Arnold Offner: Yes, yes. And like I said, they are then working through their standards development organizations. So in the PROFINET space, currently in the Ethernet IP space, they've already created something called a constrained in-cabinet type technique, also using single-pair Ethernet. And so you're slowly but surely gonna see more of those companies step up and develop that kind of thing. Yes. Well, thank you very much for taking the time. I really appreciate it. I want to wish you a wonderful rest of the day, safe travels back home. And it's been nice meeting all of you. Thank you.

Eurotech will showcase the benefits of running Ignition on an ISA62443-4-2 certified device. This demonstration will highlight how Eurotech's advanced device management capabilities can simplify the process for OT systems integrators to securely manage applications remotely. Attendees will gain insights into how the integration of Eurotech's ReliaCOR 40-13 Industrial PC with Ignition software provides a robust and cybersecure foundation for industrial applications. This collaboration not only meets stringent cybersecurity standards but also enhances the efficiency and scalability.

Transcript:

00:06
David Bader: My name is David Bader. I lead business development for a company called Eurotech. Has anybody heard of Eurotech before? A few? Yep. So I've been with Eurotech for about a year. There's, I'm the least I have the least longevity with Eurotech, even for companies that are not Eurotech. There's a lot of Eurotech employees and other companies here as well. Dave.

00:21
David Woodard: So I'm David Woodard. I'm a Solutions Architect with Eurotech. I've been here a bit longer. I've been with the company for 11 years and have been in IoT and industrial automation for probably closer to 15. So pleasure to be here.

00:36
David Bader: Yeah, I beat him out in the longevity of being in the business for sure. So I've been doing automation for 40 plus years now. So I've been involved in systems integration and distribution. I worked for AWS for a short time and led robotics for AWS for a while. The idea of coming to Eurotech was to be able to bring that kind of security level that AWS and the other cloud providers offer in the cloud down to the edge. So Eurotech is, if there's one thing that you take from this, it's that Eurotech is a company that provides enablement at the edge, right? So we provide a secure way to orchestrate and maintain your systems kind of at the edge. And we're gonna talk a lot about cybersecurity today. There's two themes, overall themes, that we that we kind of talk about from Eurotech. It's cybersecurity and the ability for systems integrators and OT providers to be able to uplift your cybersecurity posture in an area where we normally would turn that over to IT, right? So the concept is if we can provide the IT level of cybersecurity down to the OT space, that's kind of gonna be the theme that we're gonna talk a little bit about.

01:55
David Bader: And then the other one is to maintain kind of a secure remote access and remote device connectivity, right? So being able to do things that you normally would do by plugging into the device remotely, but in a secure manner, right? So being able to do VPNs that have the IT kind of functionality that you would expect from an IT perspective. So I'm pretty informal. If people have something that's genuinely on your mind, say it, but we are gonna have some questions and answers at the end. So I'm gonna talk a little bit about what Eurotech does and where we are from a... why cybersecurity is super important. And I'm gonna it over to Dave at the end, that he's going to talk about this brand new cybersecurity wizard that we're introducing here for the very first time. So you guys, the very first time you're, hearing anybody's hearing about this. Dave's going to do a demo on that.

02:49
David Bader: So Eurotech's been around for 30 plus years. We're headquartered in a small town in Amaro, Italy, which is in the Northeast part of Italy, all the way up near...

03:00
David Woodard: Austria.

03:00
David Bader: Austria. Thank you.

03:01
David Woodard: Never think of it.

03:05
David Bader: We have operations in the U.S., we have a bunch of people in the U.S., we have people in Canada and all. So some of the things that we've kind of been known for over time way back in the beginning of the, of the Eurotech history, we kind of worked with some people people that worked for Eurotech at the time developed a small protocol called MQTT. Anybody heard of MQTT, right? Yeah. There's a few people that certainly know MQTT, right. So over time we've kind of evolved from kind of a board manufacturer into a industrial automation solution provider for hardware and software. So we're very excited to now be part of the Alliance Program and out in a table 11 right across the hall here is the very first Ignition Edge, a piece of hardware that is certified to IEC 62443 IEC, ISA 62443 cybersecurity standards. And I'm gonna talk a little bit about what that means to get through some of this stuff. Our portfolio is pretty big, right? We build hardware from gateways for different applications for transportation, for industrial automation, for medical, all the way up to pretty beefy GPU-based processors that run AI and those kinds of things.

04:25
David Bader: So for any kind of application, including running Ignition on any of these devices almost, we can meet your needs. But again, the differentiator is that cybersecurity and that remote device access in a secure manner, right? So I would guess, right? I've asked a few questions already. How many people talk about cybersecurity with their customers on a regular basis? So a good portion, which I would guess, right? Because you're in this room and you wanna learn a little bit more about it. What I find really interesting is there's also an equal number of people that don't talk to customers about cybersecurity, right? They say, "Hey, that's an IT function." And I think we've passed that threshold in the space where we have to talk from an OT perspective about cybersecurity because there's a large percentage of cybersecurity efforts that are being, that are stemming from the OT space. So is that something that you guys, that resonates right from an OT space? 20% of all of the attacks are happening from an OT, from the factory floor, which when I put this deck together, I was knocked out by that number. I would have thought it was 2% or 3%. It's more than 20% now. It's pretty amazing.

05:41
David Bader: So when you think about that, what does that turn? What does that kind of mean in terms of dollars? It's significant, right? So the average financial impact from data breaches way back in 2018 was seven and a half million dollars. It's significantly more now. But why, right? The concept is we have more connectivity in the factory floor now. It's not relevant that the person on the floor, he's not missing anything. He's just not been trained necessarily in cybersecurity. It goes back to that conversation earlier where I said, most people aren't even talking about it. We've got PLC systems. They're out on the floor. Anybody got GE 90-30 back still running in their plants. Right. So these things were not designed with cybersecurity in mind. Right. So and now we're asking to put more SCADA, more capability, more MES in the plant floor that are opening up all kinds of vulnerabilities, if we don't think about it. Yeah, I messed that one up. So this is just a brief slide that you can't read, right?

06:46
David Bader: That's too small. But it's a timeline of things that have happened in the world in the last 10 years or so, right? Maybe 20 years. So Stuxnet, that resonates. Everybody's heard of Stuxnet, right? That was a, that was a cyber attack that came through an HMI, right. On a machining center. So all the way up through Target got hit, Jeep got hit, BMW got hit, the Ukraine power grid, right? That's a big deal. These things are significant impacts to the world. So I picked two, two unique applications that happened in the OT space, Brunswick Corporation, billion dollar company that makes boats. They got attacked in June of '23. So that's pretty relevant, right? Really close, only a year away. And it disrupted their entire facility and it cost them 85 million dollars, right? So that's just a small company. Well, it's a big company, but it took their quarter two financials. They saw a big impact in their quarter two financials. So if I'm a CEO, I'm pretty upset about the fact that somebody was able to breach my system through a, through the factory floor. Right. And then on another level, there's a company called Applied Materials, which are big company, right? Multi-billion dollar worldwide company. February '23, still relevant.

08:09
David Bader: They got hit through one of their suppliers. So one of their major suppliers was attacked. There was a vector that came through. They were, they had vulnerable, they had access to Applied Material's systems, and it, and the attack came through their vendor. And that one cost them 250 million dollars. So we're not talking about peanuts when we're talking about OT attacks, right? This is significant dollars and significant impact to the business. And if you're a systems integrator and you're not talking about cybersecurity, in my opinion, this is a line of, sorry, in my opinion, this is a line of business, right? This is a way for integrators to spin up a new, a new way, a new piece of business, right? Talk to your customers about cybersecurity and how you can elevate it. So I'm gonna go fast. We build, everything that we do, everything that we're talking about today is about certified cybersecurity. There's a lot of ways that people address cybersecurity in the OT space.

09:08
David Bader: We think that being certified, building to standards, designing from secure by design is a significant piece, right? What we do is we have the ability from a remote access perspective to use VPNs. Everybody probably has the way to use a VPN, but we have an on-demand VPN capability that allows for automatic teardown, right? So if you're an IT guy, automatic teardown makes a big difference. Being able to connect, remotely access, do what you need to do, and then have the VPN shut down automatically. So you don't inadvertently leave it open and leave that attack vector space available. And please, Dave, jump in if there's anything that... So nobody wants to be this guy, right? Like it's not a good thing. So secure by design, right? The whole idea is if we do this right, everybody benefits, right? Suppliers of the hardware, suppliers the customer, and then we maintain that kind of security from the start, right? So again, I'm talking about secure by design. You have to build it from the beginning. It's not something necessarily that you walk in and say, yeah, I'm gonna create this really high level of cybersecurity in your plant without looking at the overall architecture.

10:31
David Bader: So you do a risk assessment, right? We don't do that. That's not what we do. I mentioned before, we provide enablement into the mitigation process. But you reach out to companies that provide cybersecurity risk assessments. They tell you where the vulnerabilities are. If you guys have that capability, that's fantastic. I think that that's a good way to do it. And then you build, you build these, you buy these features and these capabilities into the solutions that you have. So we provide hardware for running Ignition, right? But wouldn't it be great if you could buy the hardware that runs Ignition that also has this high level of cybersecurity and gives you this remote, this secure remote access capability. And that's the method that we are, that we're talking about. So we're doing it at 62443-4-2-1. So you're not gonna remember that specification. Excuse me, -4-2 as service level two, right? So Inductive Automation is already certified to 4-1. We're certified with our hardware to 4-2. And then the customer then can quickly and easily certify their entire system to 4-3. And that's really the enablement that we're offering is being able to have that customer get to a certified cyber solution in the field very quickly.

11:49
David Bader: And if we, if in the past, what you'd have to do is buy a piece of hardware that was hardened to a certain level. And it limited some of the functionality that you were able to load onto a server, onto gateway or other hardware. Right? So now with this wizard that we're going to talk about in a minute, is you can make these decisions in the field and work with the IT department to say, we wanna certify, or we wanna harden to this level. We wanna harden to 62443 right? Or we don't need to harden to that level, but we're gonna, we're not just going to leave everything open. And we'll show you, we'll walk you through a video that shows that, how that works. So what does secure by design mean, right? You wanna follow zero trust kind of principles and they're very standard and very well defined. So being able to say, we trust no one and nothing, right? So if you start to pass along keys and email certificates and all of that stuff, all of a sudden that becomes a real problem, right? That's not secure. If you're, if you have to email someone a certificate that's standing in front of a machine, inherently that's gonna be a problem because who knows who could get to his email, right?

13:03
David Bader: And then a continuous auditing and monitoring. So when we talk about zero trust, we talk about it from an entire ecosystem perspective. So we manage the certificates, the security certificates, from the TPM level, from the chip that's on our device all the way through to the IoT devices that are connected. We manage all of that. We maintain them. We keep them current and you don't have to worry about that as an integrator or as a customer or in any way. So I think that that's a really important piece. This slide, if anything you get from this presentation, the fact that Eurotech does this for you in an IoT perspective, and then also can do it all the way to the cloud. If your application calls for connecting to the cloud, that's super important, right? How am I doing? Okay. So I talk a little bit about 62443. I mentioned that maybe some have heard about it. There's a lot of things and you see here that I'm, talking about ISA and IEC 62443. Excuse me.

14:20
David Bader: So the, one of the key things is if you build to a standard, it's no longer subjective, right? So Eurotech many years ago decided that this standard was going to be kind of the worldwide, kind of the bar in which, which people should meet. Turns out that we were right. We made a good bet. It took us about two and a half years to become IEC 62443-4-2 SL2 compliant. And now we are the first and only, quite frankly, company that builds IoT hardware and enablement to that level. There's a lot of people that build to those standards, but have not yet gotten certified, right? We don't think we'll be the only ones. We think that we were the first, which is good to be first. So we use independent testing to validate that we're built to those standards. Again, what that does is it allows you to talk to your customers about building a secure system and maybe your customer doesn't want to certify. Maybe they don't wanna get to a 4-3, but you can say to them, "Hey, these are all of the components that you would need to, if you wanted to get to certify to a standard." Now, if anybody's from Europe, anybody here from Europe?

15:39
David Bader: Yeah, there's a few, right? It's not a guessing game anymore. It's required, right? You, you have to develop, you have to deliver 62443 standard products just to meet the law, just to meet the requirements. So we're an Italian company. We build in Italy and in Germany, all over the world, quite frankly, but we know that this standard is going to permeate not just in Europe, but beyond Europe, right? So what does that mean to us in the U.S. or in Canada? It's not mandated. It's not something that they're saying that we have to do, but quite frankly, it's an ROI conversation, right? It's something that when we talk to customers about this, we can put dollars and cents. I just showed you 250 million dollars right? It's pretty hard not to show the ROI on an investment in a piece of software that has a little bit more cost to it to get to that standard. But it's helping to prevent that 250-million-dollar hit, right?

16:37
David Bader: So even if the U.S. isn't mandating it, although we do mandate cybersecurity now in a lot of ways, right? It's suggested in a lot of ways. I think this ROI discussion in this line of business discussion for the integrators in the room is super important, right? We can now talk to customers about a higher level of cybersecurity at their OT level, at their OT floor. Make sense? How am I doing?

17:00
David Woodard: Fantastic.

17:05
David Bader: Okay, good. I like constant feedback. How am I doing? You guys feel pretty good so far? Okay. Nobody's left the room yet, which is very unusual actually. So I mentioned about how long it's taken and we like to show this slide on like every presentation that we do because it's actually a physical document that you get when you get to certification, right? It's not, oh I built to this standard, but I didn't get certified. No, we've actually gone through the certification. It is a physical document that we can send to you and, and say to your, to the IT team, look, we're buying product that is built to these standards. So how does this resonate worldwide? Right? There's a bunch of teams, people from Europe here. Obviously we talked about that. And then in vertical industries, right? In vertical industries, the 62443 standard it kind of travels to different areas, right?

18:00
David Bader: So if you're in industrial automation it's 62443, if you're in rail, it's Shift2Rail, energy is 62351, and so on and so on. Right. So there's, TSA is involved. So there's a lot of different almost, every standard is actually adopting 62443 as the core to the standard and then put it, putting it into individual, their individual requirements for their particular vertical industry. So I would say that in this slide, there, we'd be hard pressed not to touch every person in this room at some point in one of these verticals, right? Everybody's touching something in these verticals, right? And if we can meet the 62443 requirement, then these are all reciprocal standards that view 62443 as a, as kind of a guide, right? So if you've got a customer that's in a process automation and they're saying we need to meet TR 63069, then we can go in and have a conversation about 62443 and how that is actually 63069 at the core.

19:10
David Bader: For medical, I think medical is... Medical up there, we have medical 60601, 100% copy and pasted from the 62443 standard. So if you're in the medical space and customers are saying, "Ah, you gotta build something to 60601 standard," we can do it. We can help you. Make sense? Okay. So then I mentioned that we're certified to SL2. What does that mean, right? So I thought it was important to kind of make sure that people understood what that means. So the idea, right, is the SL1 is the components, right? To protect the components from casual access, casual mistakes and things like that. One of the things that the standard actually does is also includes tamper resistance, right? So if somebody goes in and messes with the server, there's a switch inside the server or inside the gateway, that is a bit, that ties back to our software that you can enunciate in Ignition or send an email from our software or any of those kinds of things.

20:08
David Bader: So if somebody inadvertently, a maintenance guy comes in and says, "Hey, I gotta upgrade the firmware or something on this," they can immediately get a response. You can literally shut the computer down if it's an onsite breach. So there's lots of ways that you can use that tamper resistance piece. And then SL2 is actually designed to mitigate and kind of prevent generally acceptable or generally recognized attack vectors. So Eurotech again felt that it was important enough for us to get certified to the SL2 standard. Not too many people have considered that. All the standards that we meet, not all of them, but many of them. So today, I thought that it was important that we talk about how do you get there, right? Like how do you put a... Take a computer, put it on a shop floor, what do you have to do to get to maintain that 62443?

21:08
David Bader: And these are all the steps. I'm not gonna go through every one of them, but there's at least 10, maybe more, steps that you have to do to build and harden an industrial IoT device to this standard. So what we've done is we've said, "Okay, you know, let's build something. What are these capabilities, right? So what are the advantages of having this?" There's a lot of words here, but the bottom line is that it's maintaining and monitoring to a rigorous standard the integrity of the environment, right? And then, can I ensure that it maintains that? So, yes. Right? So the idea is that when you certify, all of this gets continuously updated and as you keep your hardware and software current, it gets updated. So again, I mentioned this wizard that we're... Dave's gonna do a demo on.

22:00
David Bader: But the idea is, how does this work during deployment, right? So you can load all the software, whether it's Ignition or other software that you want. Then you walk through this wizard and it guides you to the level of security that you wanna provide at this OT space. Unheard of. Literally takes all of those steps that we talked about before. Excuse me. Now we can do it in the field and then can we be... Can we maintain that security with Ignition? Make sense? Lot of words, but pretty important. So Dave's gonna go through the video, he's gonna talk to that, and then we're gonna do questions and answers. So we went pretty quickly. Hopefully this touched a little bit. It wasn't just commercial. It was about providing some relevance to the market and where secure by design and standards really matter.

23:00
David Woodard: Great. So now that Dave's finished, we can come back to reality of doing all this, right? 'Cause if you wanna do this for a new customer or existing customer, doing all that level of security is really difficult. I think it's one of the most challenging parts of what we do, 'cause we have to understand the IT side and the OT side and how to do like, you know, understanding like that bridge is incredibly complicated and is very hard to do well. So that's why we came up with this, right? So, 'cause what I see a lot when I do integrations or when I do deployments or installations, is you don't do it. You say, "Okay, we need to get the POC working. We need to get this application working. We'll do security when once they buy in." Right? So once they say, "Yes, we wanna do it," then we do security. And then you realize that security is breaking what you did. So the wizard, what it will do for you, I'm just gonna play this video.

23:49
David Woodard: And I'll just talk while it's playing. So basically it's just a web application that's running on these gateways. So all of our gateways from the edge devices up to our more server class boxes, provides you with this walkthrough interface of setting up networking, enabling the secure elements that you need, and being able to do it while you're doing the deployment, right? Or if you say, "Okay, we just wanna get it working, but then we wanna see what happens if we enable this SSH policy. We wanna see what happens if we try to do this other thing." You can come back to this wizard, enable that feature, and see if it still works. So there's nobody on the command line, there's nobody like hacking your Linux file system stuff. There's nobody doing that crazy stuff in a working factory or in a pilot.

24:38
David Woodard: You do it in this wizard. Let the... Let our software manage it. And so here you can see it's doing the... All these things are relevant for the certification Dave was mentioning. So if you want to come here and just say, "Hey, I just wanna be IEC certified," you can click one button. It enables all those features and you're done. This video I think is three or four minutes, but you can do it in less than a minute. And I think even more importantly than that is this is not even necessary, right? So once you do this, once you say, okay, this is the standard that we want, these are the settings that we need, this is just a configuration for us, right? So you can say, okay, now I need to order 10 of these boxes, or a hundred, or a thousand. They can come preinstalled with all these settings already on there.

25:19
David Woodard: You don't have to worry about it anymore. I think the other cool thing about this, so you'll see now they're actually going through some provisioning with AWS. We can do the same thing for Azure. We can do the same thing for custom cloud endpoints. It is an extensible interface, right? So if you say, "Oh, but you know, we need this custom thing for our cloud services or for our customer," it is an extensible platform that you can add on to. So think that's it. We do have it running on this box I have here in front of me. So if you wanna come by our booth, I can plug this in and show you live what it does. We didn't wanna do that here just for timing, but, I'm happy to show that to you if you wanna come by the booth. So I think leave time for questions.

26:01
David Bader: Yeah. We have plenty of time for questions actually. Yeah. I think we have a half an hour for questions.

26:06
David Woodard: No.

26:08
David Bader: I'm just kidding.

26:10
David Woodard: Okay.

26:10
David Bader: Yeah. I'm making the guys in the booth nervous. Go ahead. Yes, sir.

26:15
Audience Member 1: So you are saying you're providing a software stack only for the remote device, the edge device, or there is also a kind of some cloud platform?

26:23
David Woodard: It's both. So there is the edge and there's a cloud platform.

26:25
David Bader: So the question, just to repeat the question, are we providing a software stack just for the device or is there a cloud platform? And Dave's answer is yes, it's both, right? So there's a component that loads to the software or to the device itself, and then there's a cloud-based product that allows you that remote device... The remote access and the remote device connectivity. Yep. And that, you know, we can shape and manipulate that depending on the scale. I mean, the whole concept going back to that first slide is, is we wanna be able to do this at scale, right? If it's one piece, two pieces, that's great. We're all for helping with that. But if it's a 100 or 200, we wanna make it super easy. See, I told you there's always somebody that leaves early. I'm just kidding. Any other questions? Come on. There's gotta be. Yes, sir.

27:13
Audience Member 2: So your own network that's used to update the unit themselves, can they, you can you use your own wire in the private cloud network as an input?

27:25
David Woodard: Yes. Yes.

27:25
David Bader: So let's repeat the question. Can we load our remote access capability onto a private cloud or onto a server or something like that? Yes. You know, it's Dockerable, it's containerized, and you can load it almost anywhere. Yeah.

27:41
David Woodard: Yeah. We have use cases where the cloud's actually running just in the factory. Like just, no, none of the data leaves that factory. It's all isolated there. So we just run the cloud directly in that factory.

27:49
David Bader: Inherently, you know, out of the box, it's running in the cloud, it's running in AWS, but we can work with you to do it anywhere. Yeah. And in fact, we have customers that build other components that buy that capability and load it onto their devices themselves and run it in their private cloud so it doesn't have to just be on our device. Yes, sir.

28:15
Audience Member 3: This is probably a dumb question, but does this only apply to your end devices?

28:22
David Bader: No.

28:24
David Bader: No. So that's what I just said.

28:25
Audience Member 3: Some of yours, but I might already have an installed base of a thousand of some other manufacturers, Linux based, whatever controller, can your software widget be configured so that I can use your software to just secure everything?

28:42
David Woodard: It is my favorite answer in the world, and I'll say it depends. So if you want that level of security, it would require you recertifying those devices. So at least taking one and saying, "Okay, we put your tech software on here, we've done all these same steps, but you have to have it re-certified."

28:56
David Bader: That's a 62443 requirement.

28:57
David Woodard: That's not... That's just a requirement. But what I'll say is, as long as your box is running Linux preferably, but we have the ability to understand how your operating system works and that we can tie into it and make these changes, then yes, we can run on other people's hardware relatively easily.

29:14
David Bader: Yep. Not a dumb question at all quite frankly.

29:15
David Woodard: No, it's a great question.

29:16
David Bader: It's a really good question.

29:17
Audience Member 3: I might not want to replace everything.

29:19
David Woodard: No...

29:19
David Bader: Exactly.

29:19
David Woodard: Yes. And if you don't need that level of security, we can also run in Docker, right? So if you just wanna deploy it and use it for remote management and use it for some of the, some security features, but not all, that's a really easy way to deploy it and at least try it and test it and see if it works.

29:34
Audience Member 3: You sell your software...

29:36
David Woodard: So that would be a service you... We don't do, right? So that is not what we get into. So we actually, we use two external companies. I'm blanking. Two, Nord is one, but I can't remember the other. But we do our own audits, so we have to send products to them. It is periodic, I think it's three times a year, four times a year. We send them new devices, they test them to say, "Yes, you're still certified." So you would have to do something similar. And those companies, and that's how they make their money, right? So it's...

30:01
David Bader: Yeah, I thought it was in here somewhere, but it's not. So yeah, I mean that's a normal thing that customers do on a regular basis.

30:08
David Woodard: But we do have contacts with these companies, so it's also, we can help you like at least make those contacts and have that discussion.

30:15
David Bader: Yeah. There's one down here.

30:18
Audience Member 4: So that's the box that you... It's also running Ignition?

30:21
David Bader: No. No, go ahead. You go.

30:23
David Woodard: So this is more... This was the first device that we certified. But this is definitely more of a what you call like a gateway or like a, I say gateway in an Ignition audience. You all think about the software, but this is like a hardware gateway. So this would be running very close to like your PLCs and stuff. You know, the box we have that's running Ignition is a more server class and if you come to our booth you'll see it. So it's got like a Intel processor. It's got more resources. You can run Ignition on this but it'll probably more for like the Ignition Edge product. Yeah.

30:56
David Bader: Yeah. Okay. We have time for one more question. Alright. Looks like it.

31:02
Audience Member 3: Sorry to ask a second question. So I'm with the utility grid sector and you have IEC 62351 TC57. Have you ever heard of NERC CIP?

31:13
David Bader: NERC CIP? I have not. NERC, NERC, but not NERC CIP. Yeah. No, but I'll tell you what, if you would, if you take a minute and when we're done, we'll go back out there and I'll write that down and we'll get you some answers on that because it just may not be on this slide and I may not have run into it. Yep.

31:34
David Woodard: There's so many certifications and regulations that's... Especially in energy, it's...

31:37
David Bader: And that's why I put this slide into deck two is to tie it all together around that core. But I think we hit the time almost perfectly, right? So we're good. We're, again, the booth is right across from this door. If you guys have any other questions or if you want people to send you a lot of emails, come see us. Yeah. Thank you.

31:55
David Woodard: Thank you.

31:56
David Bader: Great job. Great job.

With a demand for flexibility and a strong focus on quality, SCADA systems play a crucial role in ensuring smooth operation of processes within the highly regulated Biotech industry. As a leader in the field, Cytiva is accustomed to developing solutions designed for the lab environment.  Attend this session to get a peek into the technical aspects where Ignition has been leveraged to help meet customer demands, including dynamic OPC connections and integrated eLearning.

Transcript:

00:01
Cindy Smith: Hello, welcome, good afternoon. I'm Cindy Smith, I'm the Candidate Sourcing Manager here at Inductive Automation. Welcome to today's session, How Ignition is Boosting SCADA in the Biotech Industry. To start things off, I'd like to introduce our speakers. Chris Bollom, Senior R&D Project Engineer with Cytiva. Chris is a Project Engineer with Cytiva's Automation, Digital and Learning Group, and has experience running various technology projects within the biotech sector for the last six years. As Project Manager for the mPath Link SCADA system, Chris oversees the use of Ignition Perspective to deliver flexible solutions for end users. Chris is responsible for identifying post-launch customer requirements, planning feature additions, and overseeing releases to the market to leverage the benefits of Ignition. Andrzej Kolon, Principal Automation Engineer with Cytiva, is a highly skilled Automation Engineer with 16 years of experience specializing in PLCs, HMIs, and SCADAs.

01:01
Cindy Smith: With a tenure of seven years at Cytiva, previously Paul, he held this role, excuse me, he held the position of Principal Automation Engineer in the Automation, Digital, and Learning Group. In this role, Andrzej led automation efforts for various biotech projects, and he began his journey with Ignition SCADA in 2019 as the Automation Lead for the mPath Link development. Presently, Andrzej is actively engaged in new technology research, and providing mentorship to fellow automation engineers within Cytiva. Please help me welcome Chris and Andrzej.

01:38
Chris Bollom: All right, this is cool. Cool. Good stuff. So, thanks guys. So, what we'll go through today is a little bit of our perspective working for a company called Cytiva in the biotech industry of how Ignition is supporting us in terms of delivering our customer needs. We'll talk a little bit about some of the key demands from the customers, and then Andrzej will go through a bit of a deep dive into how we've leveraged Ignition on some specific topics. Already had an introduction from us, so. We'll have a little overview quickly on who Cytiva as a company are. So, effectively, we're a global provider of technologies and services aimed at accelerating drug development. So, there's a range of products, which I'll touch on in a second, but essentially we're producing consumables and hardware to support our customers made drugs. We have sites all across the world, and myself and Andrzej are based in the UK down in Portsmouth on the South Coast. We do have quite a big presence in the US as well, particularly on the East Coast here. So, in terms of the products that Cytiva offer, it's the full end-to-end solution, which covers small batches up to 2000 liter volumes, right from upstream manufacturing and in terms of bioreactors through to the downstream purification and filtration devices to produce an end product.

03:06
Chris Bollom: Predominantly, Cytiva focuses on single-use technology, so that's really to deliver the flexibility that our customers ask for. And you can see on the board there where we'll be focusing on mPath Link, which is a SCADA platform aimed at the process development phase of manufacturing, which is really in the early stages before we get to large-scale manufacturing where customers really demand flexibility. So, we'll start, we'll delve into that in a little bit more detail in a second, but first we can focus on some of the needs that our customers are asking for in that process development sector. So, customers, first of all, are really looking for scalability at this stage because process development is fairly early on, customers don't know the full extent of the equipment that they'll require, so they wanna start small and build equipment in as they go. Added to that, flexible access is something that customers want in a clean room environment, they don't wanna be gowning up every time they need to check what their process is doing, they'll wanna be able to remotely access their equipment and monitor their processes. Added to that, customers really ask for out-of-the-box use.

04:18
Chris Bollom: They're often smaller customers in this process development sector, they won't have large automation teams, they'll often be scientists that wanna just get the software and start using it to start their processes as quickly as they possibly can. And they're also demanding flexibility and access to data, mainly because in that process development space it's quite early on, customers don't know exactly how they're gonna transfer into manufacturing at that stage and they want to be able to change things and experiment with how they can produce the best yields possible. So that led us as Cytiva to launching the mPath Link, SCADA platform, which is built on Ignition. It was launched back in 2021, utilizing Perspective, but there was a version working on vision a few years before that. The main purpose of it really is to provide a standard UI across Cytiva equipment. As I mentioned, this is really aimed at the process development stage of manufacturing, so quite early on in the development process, but the intention is to try and expand that software across Cytiva's range of equipment.

05:30
Chris Bollom: And since 2021, we've got quite a robust process in terms of capturing needs from the field, and we've had a number of updates and iterations just to really hit those demands of the customers. And that wouldn't really have been possible without using Ignition, so linking that back to those key use cases from our customers. The first point around scalability that our customers are asking for, obviously the license model for Ignition is critical to helping with that. When customers want to scale up and buy more equipment, the traditional tag-based licensing models would be a problem to them. We obviously don't have that with Ignition. And Andrzej will delve into the technical side of this in a second. But one of the key things that we've done with this is the ability to add OPC connections in runtime, which makes it really easy for customers to purchase more equipment and add that into their processes.

06:26
Chris Bollom: Utilizing the perspective modules obviously been critical for us as well, particularly with some of these customers being startups, they're quite receptive to modern technology, want the ability to utilize tablets and mobiles. So we launched mPath Link with a mobile app so customers can access that, and that obviously takes away that need for customers to gown up and enter a clean room every time they want to do something. One of the other topics that Andrzej will delve into a little bit more is e-Learning as well, that supports that out of the box approach. With, as I said, people being generally scientists using this software, they wanna get going with it straight away. So we've utilized Ignition to add in some videos and e-Learning modules within the software. And then finally, as I mentioned, people will want to play around in this space, try and improve yield. And Ignition's really helped with that with a range of different charting tools. So we've added in features over time, things like a batch compare module, which allows customers to try and essentially get a golden batch and identify how they can make process improvements to improve their yield. So I think I'll hand over to Andrzej let's go through a little bit more detail on the technical side of this.

07:43
Andrzej Kolon: Thank you, Chris. Hello everybody. So we now concentrate on how the general architecture looks like in mPath Link. We have to go for a bit of the hardware, so then we've got like a perspective on how actually the software is built as well. So if you look at this slide at the bottom of it, we have a unit level, which is a dedicated hardware. So it can be anything. It can be a flask, it can be a dedicated bioreactor like you see here. It's a rocking bioreactor. It's this one here, and this is just a flask with few additional sensors and things like that. So basically this is the hardware that does something which is really particular peculiar for the particular process. On the higher level, we've got the controller level, and basically this is what we call controller or tower.

08:32
Andrzej Kolon: Basically what it is is a set of sensors and activators like gases or pumps, and they are controlled. There's a PLC inside, it's a back of PLC. It's OPC UA server. That's quite crucial here. And what it actually consists of is all the I/O and sensors that are in general, general purpose ones, and they pretty much can handle commonalities between all the processes. There's one-to-one relationship between a tower and the bioreactor. And this explore via OPC UA to our mPath Link, SCADA server. And that is currently on a standard deployments, that's Windows stand Ignition Gateway, 8.1.17, and Microsoft SQL 2019. All of that runs on a PC, dedicated PC that we sell as well and as a standard offering. And it provides as a visualization, we provide perspective workstation for mobile and for desktop applications. And it's basically supports everything that perspective workstation supports.

09:57
Andrzej Kolon: When it comes to Ignition Gateway itself, it consists of three projects. The global project consists of everything that is common for all the other projects. And then we've got mPath Link project and that's main desktop application. And then we've got a mobile version of the application. We decided to split those together because we had quite a distinguishable different user cases for each inside. It's much easier to manage those two applications as well, two different applications as a well. Well, like, as a separate application really. Now I'm gonna present a little bit of the video of how the actual software looks like we're using perspective, obviously with all, well, hopefully a lot of bells and whistles that comes with it. It's a modern UI. We design our UI with our UX team.

10:57
Andrzej Kolon: We've got internal UX teams. All the workflows are basically designed by them and we just follow what they want us to do. Perspective is really great with it. The UX is always focusing on new approaches, new workflows, all these standard web application kind of front end. And, yeah, with Perspective Module, it's really easy to meet those requirements. So I'm gonna play this video and we're gonna talk a little bit about it. So that's how the application looks like. You have access to individual units and the main dashboard. We don't have a limit to have amount of units we support in one application. It's a dashboard that is specific for the unit with few KPIs, process screen. We're gonna talk about process screen a bit more.

11:50
Andrzej Kolon: Alarms, trends, that's events recipe system, everything you have access to. You have also access with your cog icon to additional settings for each bioreactor and for the main system level as well. You can set up a lot of stuff here, specific to particular units. You can set up alarms. You can enable, disable alarms so everything is flexible. We provide maximum flexibility so the customers can set up their equipment exactly how they want. They can disable alarms, enable any alarm they want in the system. E-Learning as well. I'm gonna talk more specifically about e-Learning. You also have process screens I've mentioned with access to individual face space for each I/O that is configured for the system. So that's how it looks like everything is parametrized. And that's really, really quick with through how the application looks like. It's really minimalistic. And another video I want to focus on, it's actually running again.

13:17
Andrzej Kolon: Is what Chris already mentioned. So we're gonna deep dive a little bit into how we create units in runtime and how we add OPC UA connections in runtime. So that video will present how our customers that don't really have a big automation knowledge, if at all actually handle application fully from the front end. Bear in mind, these are mostly scientists that we are dealing with. So they know... They are really clever people, but they know pretty much everything they can about the process, not necessarily a lot of software/automation knowledge. So, yeah. This is how you see the software when it has nothing configure on it. You just log into the system. You log in and you go to settings and use add your controller. You select from available types. We have two types of the controllers. One is with pumps. The other one with this, without pumps, you just name your tower and you put IP address in. So that's the only bit that they really need to know. That can change. That can be different subnet, it can be whatever the IT department told them to put in or anything else. And then they need to put host name. If they don't know what it means, they just click on a help here and the software will tell them where to look to see what the actually the magic number is. Once they figure that one out.

15:06
Andrzej Kolon: They just click add and OPC UA connection is created. I clicked the, No, on the creating the units because it was the second thing explicitly I wanted to show. So once they add the connection, they can start setting up the unit and here they can select from all the available types of the units. They put the unit name and you see a lot of other main cases that... Main setup parameters they can have. They put all of those how they want, and they are at the page where they can set up the I/O. So pretty much what's happening here, they can add remove I/O. We just have a good guess of the default I/O settings. And based on that, they can modify everything. Here it's additionally we support user configurable I/O. It can be anything. It can be input, output, analog, digital, whatever they need they can do once they create it and agree on everything, they safe, we're happy, boom, job done. They have a unit and pretty much from here they can start running the processes straight away. They have a default batch they can run. So pretty much it takes two minutes to set up the whole software to run. And there's unlimited support to your connections, and there's unlimited support to the amount of units you can create.

16:22
Andrzej Kolon: So, now we'll focus on how it actually works from the back of things and we focus at the beginning at how we create this OPC UA connection. So what happens is at the top you can see how the application presents the controllers. Here's a example of three controllers, three controllers that are set up with different IP address and stuff like that. So pretty much what it does, it just represents exactly what is happening on the gateway side. So all the connections you can see at the bottom, they're standard gateway connections, and we just show them on the application. You can ask why we are doing that at all. So the reason why we're doing it is it's much easier for the customer to go through the process of setting it up, like I just shown a movie. But also we don't want to give customer necessarily access to Gateway. So he can ask, like he can modify a lot of things and also damage a lot of things. And we don't necessarily want to allow that to happen.

17:24
Andrzej Kolon: So how it works is there's a magic link at the top and this link gives you access to internal ignition gateway database, and pretty much everything that can be configured using your ignition gateway web server, you can see here. And you can interrogate and you can basically check what's happening and how it's happening. So this is the URL for that. You've got the list and you can query the database and you get the results at the bottom. So we, as I said, we're gonna focus on OPC servers. So this is the example of OPC servers. We just select OPC servers. We get all the fields here, and as a result, we get free servers like you've seen on the previous spring screens. So we've got free servers. All the names are exactly like that.

18:19
Andrzej Kolon: You've got type description and read only. And what is really important is the OPC server IDs. So that's gonna be really important because once you get your OPC servers and you work out how this is actually presented, and what are the fields you get to the OPC UA connections. We are working only with OPC UA. Our towers are back of towers, as I said, and their OPC UA server. So we know that we support only those back of towers. So we know that we are looking for OPC UA connection settings. So you can see at the bottom, and you can see here a little bit more at the top. These are all the fields that you can set up when you're going through your Wizarding Gateway. You can actually see all of those settings here as just fields. And what is really important here, you can see the server settings ID. And this ID links with servers. So each connection setting record has an equivalent and is assigned to actually the server itself. So that's pretty much how the link between server and its settings is made in the database. So we work with SDK, and I just noted here a few things that are really critical for the thing to actually work. And we work with SDK. It's 8.1.17. It doesn't, this does not have change too often.

19:47
Andrzej Kolon: So it worked. We went through 8.1.7, then 9, then 17 and it just never never changes. We're working with a context of Ignition Gateway. We also work with OPC EE server settings record and we work with OPC UA server type and also what is important we are interrogating, and there's the bit here, we are interrogating extension points. Extension points, the way I understand them, is pretty much capabilities of your gateway. So you're pretty much checking what the gateway is capable of and returns that it's actually capable to work with OPC UA. So how does it actually work when you want to program something? We use something called persistent interface and we create new persistent interface. So first of all we create a new server, so what we're doing is we create new OPC server setting record. We pass from the code name, server type and we just save this persistent interface. So that's the first bit you need to do. And then once you get that server saved you can start playing with actual settings of your connection. So what we're using here is we're creating a new OPC UA connection setting record that's pretty much one row here.

21:35
Andrzej Kolon: And we use, again, persistent interface and we associate that with one of the server's IDs that we already saved and pretty much we have access in that way to any of the settings from your Gateway. So that's pretty much how you can save anything, you can pass this all as the parameters, you can do whatever you want. Here it's not the problem, it's far more than I'm listing here. At the end of the day what is really important is to get persistent interface and save it. And as the last thing you need to notify the Gateway that actually something has been added. So you can say it has been added, there's option to have it modified and removed as well so quite a lot of interesting things you can do with it. It's all available in the documentation. So that's how we create OPC UA connection in runtime and there's a lot of interesting stuff there and some magic URLs and some magic fields. Here I'm gonna show you now how we create a units in runtime.

22:43
Andrzej Kolon: It's quite an interesting approach as well in my opinion and also this functionality doesn't involve any SDK or any additional code at all. So let's say not off-the-shelf supported by Ignition. That's kind of more mainstream usage of Ignition. So first of all I wanted to show this is... And this is common for all the empathic applications. What we're trying to do is to move as much configuration of the software to database. So if we can store some data inside the database, default values, user configurations, other sort of configurations, we store them in the database and our UI is responsive based on query results from the database. So we try to hard code as little as possible inside the perspective. So we've got our OPC UA connections, our controller towers and we basically store that information and we just query if we need it and we store those query results in session parameters and we just throw them at the screens where we need to. So we can see those towers are the bottom three towers I believe.

24:03
Andrzej Kolon: So we do the same with our units and that's what we're gonna concentrate right now on. We've got three units and we also have exactly the same idea. Whatever we have units, basic information is stored in the table and if we need to present it in the perspective page, we just query stuff, return the values and we sort them out on the view. Our units also consist of folders. So every unit is a folder. Every folder has additional folders inside that are pretty much specific to the I/O that we are using and every I/O is a UDT. Well, it consists of groups of UDTs basically. We have our UDT definitions. This is static and we use parameters to those UDTs.

25:04
Andrzej Kolon: So pretty much we, I will show you how we instantiate those UDTs with parameters that are here. That's how we create the tags for our OPC UA connection. So basically, what you've seen in the video is as soon as customer saves the bioreactor, we go through a series of events that are happening and we trigger code and you notice there's certain default parameters customer can add, remove from different I/O and we just constantly create a dictionary where we store all those changes and all those configuration settings and at the end we create a data set out of them and we pretty much, the first thing we do, we insert to a table that you've seen already a new bioreactor is created with unique ID and then we start to go through that dictionary of the I/Os and we create I/Os. So here we focus on 1270 ID and you can see 1270 bioreactor has all those I/Os with all some basic configuration already predefined based on some parameters inside the database and the ones that were put on them configured on the UI side.

26:23
Andrzej Kolon: So, here what is important, we're just gonna quickly go through that. It's ID78, which is our nano temperature. We're gonna follow through that example here. So we've got another table in which we store additional information of what's happening with our I/O, what are some other default IDs, and what is really important is what are the UDT types. So here, what is really important is what actually UDT we're gonna use and what is the sub-UDT if any, that we're gonna use. In this case, it's 2 and 19 that's quite important. So the next thing we're doing is we actually try to understand what the 2 and 19 means. And 2 is our input object, and it's a path to our UDT. So if you've seen our previous screen, there's a UDT which is actually called input object, and there's also a PT100, which is 19.

27:22
Andrzej Kolon: So basically, we understand that we have now... We will be working with input object, and there's actually a PT100. And we start to create folders for our bioreactor, and pretty much we create what we see here is an object, and the object details, and we're just instantiating with system.tag.addtag. We create sub-paths, sub-objects if necessary, and we pass parameters and attributes for I/O path, which is our input object and PT100. So that becomes our input object, and this is our PT100 object. So the next thing we do, and we focus here on an Int, which is analog input row. We're working with another piece of default I/O setting, which just helps us instantiate those UDTs with a certain magic parameters that we are expecting from our PLC. So PLC has an object structure.

28:37
Andrzej Kolon: It's an array of, actually here, control object inputs, and there's 31 of them, and they are always there. They are static, and we either use them or not. That depends on the scanner, actually, and the way it's actually implemented and configured by the customer, but pretty much we're talking about 31. And this is our prefix based on that we know, and we're passing parameters of temperature, index, and control object. Our server is one of the servers we already created, and pretty much we resolve to that, which gives us communication quality. Actually, good to see it. It's nice. Anyway, that's how it works. The last bit of presentation I want to show is how we implemented a pretty simple, but really satisfying, in my opinion, bit which is e-learning. It's quite flexible, again. Again, it's the same concept. As much information as possible, we store in the database, where we can change the content without actually modifying the code itself. It's quite important.

29:51
Andrzej Kolon: It's quite important for us, because, for instance, in this case, we didn't know what the content of e-Learning will be at the moment we were implementing the solutions, so we basically didn't know what the database will look like, so we had to be really flexible here. So, there are two options here. One is we store user manuals, and that's just the PDFs, and the customer can add their own PDFs if they want to have any SOPs they want to add. But pretty much this is the standard setup with our user manuals and the option to browse and add new ones if they want to. And there's an option of e-learning, and this is quite interesting. It's contextualized based on unit type, and it actually also gives you an option of having a QR code or an external link that you can click on.

30:49
Andrzej Kolon: So, how pretty much it works, like we'll see in a second, but what we have is our e-learning portal. Cytiva has an e-learning portal, and customer can log in and access all the necessary manuals and all the necessary videos that explain how to do certain things by just watching them on a second monitor, if they have one, or just the scan, and well, if they have a monitor and they have actually internet access, but also they can just have a mobile or a tablet, they can scan QR code and pretty much go for video and follow the video on the real device and actually start making things happen. So, again, the database, the database is a set of names, paths, type, which is either document or PDF, sorry, video or PDF and bioreactor type, and that's pretty much it.

31:48
Andrzej Kolon: And we query the database based on the context on the webpage that we are accessing, and eventually we're getting to that one component, which is just one single tile, and we repeat it as many times as we need to in perspective, and we link, we bind labels here to a content of the query that we have, and also we generate on the fly and runtime a QR code just using a standard ignition barcode. We just bind it, and it just works. It's quite easy, quite flexible, and you can pretty much expand the system to however many what pages, links, URLs you want, and then pretty much, you don't have to modify any code. You just chuck stuff into the database and it just works. It's quite cool, I think, and quite simple. Chris, over to you again.

32:47
Chris Bollom: Cool, yeah. And this is just a final one of sort of, I guess, next steps that we're looking towards with this. So, obviously, we've been hearing about it most of the day, but fully intend to utilize the better version of 8.3 and see what we can potentially do moving forwards with mPath Link. And we're definitely finding that customers are becoming more receptive to cloud technologies, so connecting up to various modeling software packages and things like that. So potentially moving towards investigating Ignition Cloud and Edge is something that we might well do there as well. And then two pieces more internal to Cytiva that we're potentially looking at doing with this of expanding mPath Link across our product range. And really to do that, moving more into the manufacturing scale, customers are looking more for robust batch management solutions. So potentially integrating some sort of batch engine to mPath Link is also something that we're looking to do there. So I think with that, that's it from us then. So, yeah. Welcome any questions.

33:50
Cindy Smith: Any questions?

34:00
Audience Member 1: For the e-learning, when you guys implemented that, does it give them credentials when they watch the videos, like credit? Like checking the credits of like the operators who logged in and they watched it and they took a test and they kind of get credit for that? I've had customers ask me about implementing something like that within Ignition.

34:20
Andrzej Kolon: So pretty much how it works is just the access to external web page that Cytiva owns with all the content. And that's additional web portal they have. They would have to log in with their credentials that they purchased.

34:35
Speaker 4: Oh, so it's like external manage. Okay.

34:37
Andrzej Kolon: It's external, correct. Yeah, we don't store the data locally on the server because it changes too frequently and it's updated independently of how we update our software.

35:00
Audience Member 2: Hello. I saw on one of the screenshots that you had some sort of flag or counter that determined the order of the tiles, the units that you're creating, the controllers. Was that what was happening? Was there like a specific thing that was ordering, like when a user creates a new controller, does that like control how that grid looks or how was that laid out?

35:25
Andrzej Kolon: Yes. So basically it's based on creation time. So that's how it's being shuffled around on the page. Yeah. There's no customization on this particular case.

35:34
Audience Member 2: It was still a pretty cool solution. I liked it.

35:36
Andrzej Kolon: Thank you.

35:45
Audience Member 3: Hey, thanks guys. So it might be a bit of a pivot, but I guess the question is, 'cause you mentioned early on a lot of the customers that you sell into tend to be smaller companies. It's not always big firms. So what's the technical maturity of a lot of the customers that you're selling into? And then how do you find, like do they have a lot of IoT solutions, maybe like MES Lite or something like that? And then how's the integration of this solution into that existing technology stack? It's a bit of a broad question, but do you tend to find it's a complex process or it's a relatively simple or what's it look like?

36:24
Chris Bollom: I guess I can do the first bit and you can talk about the integrations 'cause you worked on that a little bit more. But there's a variety because we work with some small customers. Their technical maturity won't be very high at all 'cause they're essentially looking to get acquired in this industry. So we'll be quite new into this. We'll pretty much use the solution that gives them the best opportunity of starting off. But we also have large customers in this space. And probably the thing there, I think, is everyone's trying to move to a more modern architecture. But particularly in the biotech industry, people are quite cautious to change and adopt new technology. So particularly initially working with Ignition in this space, it was a challenge both internally and externally to push that on people in a typically conservative industry. But I think we're starting to see people more willing to adapt, as it was mentioned here in sort of more modern technologies. And that's something we're looking to do. But I guess you can mention some of the integrations that potentially worked on.

37:25
Andrzej Kolon: Yes. So pretty much in PD scale, where we operate at the moment, customers don't really require off-the-shelf solutions. Well, they do, but we don't provide it at this stage. We have a lot of proof of concept that we are working on how to make things more plug-and-play. And obviously with the solution that we have, OPC UA connections for servers actually are pretty, pretty easy to do. But customers, they start to ask for that more and more, but it's still considered a PD scale. It would be nice to have everything orchestrated or pulled even into one database. But they're more concerned about actually making the thing work in general. So what I do in order not to kill all my cell cultures, what to do not to produce anything, not even a big amount, just make it work, actually. So that's where they concentrate on, obviously.

38:30
Andrzej Kolon: So we're getting it more and more, and we're getting there. We do a lot of proof of concept, like Chris mentioned here, batch engine, but overall the integration bit is more for us. Like if a customer doesn't want to use our standard offering in terms of PC that we're running on, we would be installing or he would be installing the software on their servers or a different kind of thing. So bigger deployments, we basically prefer to do it on the servers or maybe even bigger desktops. It's like really that kind of scale. So you can have like five, six bioreactors running and then basically you're still pretty much using a benchtop. So integration is more like where you install that thing. We did a few OSI PI integrations and things like that to some higher level logic, but that's with OPC UA so it's really simple with Ignition.

39:35
Cindy Smith: Thank you, Chris and Andrzej for your presentation today, and thank you all for joining us. Enjoy the rest of ICC.

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.