Inductive Automation Blog

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HMI Redesign: Give Your Screens A Performance & User-Experience Makeover Lauren Walters Fri, 06/29/2018 - 08:10
It’s no secret that people love a makeover story, especially one involving a dramatic “before and after.” At last year’s ICC, Inductive Automation’s Marketing Co-Director Steven Fong, UX Designer Ray Sensenbach, and Design Services Manager Stevenson Yuan presented a talk titled “Making Your HMIs More User-Friendly,” essentially a makeover presentation for industrial interfaces. Our design gurus took real Ignition projects submitted by the Ignition community members and gave them a complete overhaul to improve their design layout, user experience (UX), and overall performance.
12 Powerful Ways to Use PLCs with SQL Databases - Part 1 Lauren Walters Tue, 06/12/2018 - 07:41
Before he founded Inductive Automation, our CEO Steve Hechtman worked as a control system integrator and often encountered the obstacle of being unable to make operations-side data available to the IT side. This inspired Steve and his team of developers to create a tool — now known as the Ignition SQL Bridge Module — that moves data bidirectionally between PLCs and SQL databases using OPC. Since then, members of the Ignition community have used the versatile capabilities of the SQL Bridge Module to implement many creative and effective solutions in their industrial systems. Co-Director of Sales Engineering Travis Cox highlighted a dozen of the most useful SQL Bridge tips in the webinar “12 Ways to Use PLCs and SQL Databases Together.” In this two-part blog series, we’ll unpack each of these tips in some detail.