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Integrating Ignition with Exciting Peripherals Rachel Bano Thu, 11/07/2024 - 08:47

Ignition is based on open standards, is deployable anywhere, provides data to anyone, and can integrate with virtually any system or device. This allows you to leverage best-in-class technology with seamless integration to Ignition. Perspective and the native iOS and Android application is a perfect example of this. Ignition  enables people to extend their applications to a phone or tablet by leveraging the camera, GPS, NFC, Bluetooth LE, and other mobile tools. In this session, you’ll get some exciting use cases and live demos featuring one exciting OT peripheral and one very cool guest appearance you won’t want to miss!

Transcript:

00:00
Travis Cox: Hello, everybody. Hey, thank you. I'll take that. How y'all doing this afternoon? All right, well, I have an amazing and exciting session for y'all here today. The title... The marketing team wanted me to keep it pretty vague, so that's what we did. But it's, we're gonna be showing how we can integrate Ignition with some really exciting peripherals here today. So, of course, I am Travis Cox, Chief Technology Evangelist here. And throughout the years I've being Inductive Automation, I've always been excited to just play with new technology. Of course, when people ask, "Can Ignition get connected with this or do that?" I'm the first one that says, "Of course, let's just go figure out how to make this happen." So that's really what this session's all about is how we can just solve customers' pain points and leverage Ignition to do that.

00:56
Travis Cox: So, we're gonna look at a couple of things today. First is just why Ignition's so freaking awesome. We're gonna look at that, and of course, interoperability, just the keys about interoperability with Ignition and why it's so important out there. And then we have two exciting demonstrations for you here today that show just that with some pretty cool technology that has some pretty big impactful benefits for customers. So let's first start before we get into those demos. Why is Ignition so awesome? So, I wanted to bring the attention back to our mission statement because the mission statement really says a lot about the company's philosophy, what we are here to do. And that is to create industrial software that empowers you to turn great ideas into reality by removing all technological and economic obstacles. So simply put, it's to empower you to accomplish your goals, right?

01:54
Travis Cox: And you saw with [Ignition] 8.3, all the new features that are gonna help you do more and ultimately solve pain points for customers. That's the goal around Ignition. And of course, the motto, "Dream It. Do It." I could tell you that throughout my career at Inductive, not only with customers, but even with inside of our company, whenever there's a potential challenge or problem that we wanna solve, I'm the first one to say, "Let's go build it with Ignition." And we've actually used Ignition house for a lot of cool things, and I'll mention that in a moment. But one of the main reasons that Ignition's so awesome is that from the beginning, we chose it to be a platform. And being a platform, there's some important tenets about that, that allow for all these amazing solutions to be built out, right?

02:42
Travis Cox: First and foremost, that it's based on open standards. We don't want things proprietary, locked down, we talked about that earlier, but it is based on standards, open standards. That right there means interoperability. But it also has lot has to have lots of connectivity options. And over the years, we've added, added a lot of options to Ignition from our PLC drivers, of course, the OPC UA, MQTT, REST, our AWS and Azure connectors of course MongoDB. And now with 8.3, Kafka. And there's just gonna be a plethora of more connectors that will be looking at. And the idea of having all the connectors is so that you can use what makes the most sense for you and put together systems in unique ways.

03:24
Travis Cox: Platform independence is also really important, of course, with that, because then you're not locked down to how you wanna deploy it, where you want it to go. You can deploy it anywhere in your infrastructure, how you want to deploy it. And I think that's an important part of just why it could be anywhere and do anything.

03:42
Travis Cox: And the last part is extensibility. This, I can't stress enough. We have two, there's a lot of tools Ignition, but there's two major ways that, you know, if it's not built into Ignition, that we can ultimately solve it, solve a problem, and that's through Python and the module SDK. So with Python, there's lots of options to bring in other Python libraries, write some code. Not everybody wants to write code, but there's that ability is there. We can go further. It's a variable integrated within Ignition. But the module SDK gives us that freedom that if we want to, if we have the will and the way and we wanna solve it, we can do that, right?

04:21
Travis Cox: So these are the reasons that we chose... With Ignition being a platform that just allows us to innovate and to not ask for permission. We at Inductive Automation wanna build everything, but we can't build everything. But if we have, if we continue making the best platform, adding great features, and have it, have the ability for you to go and innovate and add on top of that, now you have the best of all the worlds. Now, not only do you have to have a good technology, but you have to have an ecosystem. And that's the thing that I love the most. I love being here and talking with customers and partners and integrators and everybody who has these amazing ideas. Because this ecosystem, this large ecosystem that we have, is what really contributes to generating all these amazing, innovative ideas.

05:11
Travis Cox: And one of the demos that we're gonna do today was just inspired by somebody who had an idea said, "Hey, can we, let's talk about this. Can we do this?" And sure enough, "Of course we can, let's go, and let's go figure it out." Also, that one thing that we've done a lot to contribute to encourage contribution or collaboration is by building a lot of tools for the community. So y'all have used the forum, our Ignition Exchange, where we can freely share resources with each other, the Ignition ideas [portal] where you can share ideas about what you want the software to do in the future and vote those ideas up. And we're taking a lot of those off, of course, with looks like 8.3, and we also have an open-source module development community called the Ignition Module Development Community.

06:00
Travis Cox: And all of these are to just encourage that collaboration and that innovation that we can do on top of Ignition. So for me, being a platform is what really leads to this interoperability and the ecosystem that we have. Because, again, if you have the idea there, and you have the knowledge around Ignition, you can go and build just about anything you want. I have never once said "no" to something. So in terms of building everything Ignition's really limitless, right? There's lots of possibilities that we can build. HMI/SCADA, of course, right? MES. IIoT applications. I don't know if you guys checked out the SCADA Arcade. That's built on Ignition, it's pretty cool, right? Games that are in Ignition. We actually have built our CRM in Inductive Automation with Ignition from the very beginning.

06:56
Travis Cox: And that has evolved over the years. And it's been a great tool for us because we can change it, adapt it, and make it fully customized the way that we want it. We have a Lobby Sign-In if you come to our office. So Sign-In, that's a Perspective application on a tablet where you'll print out your badge. We've, I don't know if you, if anybody, has played around with License Portal, but it's a portal that we built that is out there for all of you. If you want access to it, contact your sales person where you can manage your licenses and you can see what's going on in there and check and work with that. That's simply just a Perspective application contacting to a REST API that we have provides that information.

07:38
Travis Cox: Home automation systems. I'm a big home automation enthusiast. Do we have others in the room? All right. I love it. So that's, it's easy. We can go, I'm connecting to my Z-Wave and ZigBee devices at home. I am connected to a bunch of REST APIs from things like REST and Ring and, or sorry, Nest and Ring and all sorts of different systems to bring it all together into that single pane of glass, Ignition. In fact, I have a tablet for my boys for the, like the lighting control of the room, right? To set the ambiance when we watch movies. So it's fun. You can do all these cool things with Ignition as well as just build IT applications, database applications, and the list continues to go on and on and on. Hopefully get the kind of idea that we're setting forth here. Lots of options for what is possible.

08:24
Travis Cox: So I think for me, what I've tried to instill in a lot of people when I work... If you get on a call with me and we're talking about problems that are out there, it's really you need... With Ignition, I have the confidence to say, "Yes." I know it. I know it like the back of my hand. I know what it can do. So if somebody ever asks, you know, "What if I want to connect to something that Ignition doesn't already support out of the box? What if I need a new feature?" Or "What if I need a new visualization component?" Something that is not there already. Well, that's okay, there's no problem. There is a path forward. Now, I'm not suggesting everybody here go and build a module or go write a lot of Python code.

09:06
Travis Cox: But the point is that there is a path forward. Through talking to us and giving us ideas of where we can... How we can... What we can do in Ignition and shape the future of Ignition to you building cool modules and providing solutions for your customers. There is always a path forward, right? We can say confidently, "Yes." And that you walk away from anything from this session. That's the one thing that I think is really, really important. And as you can see in the Discover Gallery and a lot of projects, there's been a ton of innovation just because of this fact.

09:41
Travis Cox: So today I wanna show two cool examples of this. And the first example was one that came to me from an integrator in Canada. They had asked about particular technology, they got us hooked up with the vendor and they said, "Hey, can... Is this possible? Can we do you know this with Ignition?" And it was a slam dunk. It was really easy. And that was using Apple Vision Pro. So I don't know if you guys have played around with it yet. But the era of spatial computing, it is pretty incredible of what's possible. So the customer came to us about a use case around operational, creating dashboards and HMIs with this. And the idea of being able to seamlessly blend the digital world, the HMI, if you will, with the physical space. That's what this can really bring. So that Virtual Control Room, they had a few different use cases that they wanted to solve and they wanted somebody at home to have, to turn their home office into that Virtual Control Room where you'd have lots of TVs on a wall to have lots of applications up where you can see that.

10:49
Travis Cox: And that's a perfect use case for it. And then the other is like a hands-free HMI, anywhere in the plant to be able to go out there and have the HMI up, but be able to still see and work with the process. Those are two really cool use cases. Another one, of course, that they wanna do is actually have their users run through real-life scenarios or simulations within this. And that's for training, get new people understanding different scenarios and seeing how they can solve that. So here's the cool thing. When they ask the question, it's like, look, Perspective's native HTML5. Of course it can run on Apple Vision Pro. Not only that, the Apple Vision Pro runs all iOS apps and the Perspective native app runs natively on that. So we are gonna work, our development team's gonna work on building a deeper integration with visionOS, and that is to do things like a one click to open up all the different displays in that physical space as well as using gestures because you have good gesture support. So would you all like to see it?

11:56
Audience: Yeah.

11:56
Travis Cox: All right.

12:01
Travis Cox: So, let me put this on here. All right, let me get it on and we're gonna project it here on the back screen. But word of caution, if anybody has the motion sickness, you may want to look away for a little bit. And let me close this over here. All right, can y'all see what I'm seeing?

12:32
Audience: Yeah.

12:33
Travis Cox: Woo. All right, so the first part of my stress is good because I can actually see it behind me. So that's amazing. All right. Because you know live demos, right? I've always done live demos and you never know. Lots of variables. All right, let's bring up... So are you still seeing me? All right, so guess what? Apple Vision Pro, I said, first of all, Perspective HTML5, right? So that means if I open Safari, look at there is our beautiful demo project. And let's go to... I don't know, our data center project. Have you all seen our online demo project? So it's right in front of me, but I'm gonna move it over you guys right there. And we can make it maybe a little bit bigger. So there's my... There's one. Now I'm not gonna open 20 of these for you guys, but there's one HMI, let's now go to that Perspective app. There's our Perspective app. I'm gonna put it right there. Actually, we're gonna go right here and I'll show you why. So we're gonna open that one and let's go to a different demo project. And putting my fingers together is how we actually click around. So let's go to our building management system.

14:04
Travis Cox: And we're gonna go to our floors. So this is actually our live... A live view of our building in terms of the temperature and all that. So there's my cool little example of my HMIs that are in physical space. Now, like I said, what's really cool is that it is in the physical space. And so like if I, you know, it stays there, right? If I walk through it, it's pretty cool. Oh yeah, look at that and we're gonna, we'll go back, but I can have as many of these displays as I want open. And I can still see all of you. I can still do my work, I can still have this, but from a virtual control room, from an HMI, from a simulation perspective, I think this is a pretty cool technology. What do you think?

14:47
Travis Cox: Yeah.

14:54
Travis Cox: All right, so let's make sure that nobody gets sick in this room and let's stop mirroring there. Okay, so that was our first demo. If you thought that was pretty cool, wait for the second one. Now, of course, for that second one, I needed some help with this one. This was kind of fortuitous when I was doing this session or at least when I got introduced to Apple Vision Pro. I was like, "Man, I'd really like to do a session at the conference about cool gadgets. It'd be kind of fun." And then somebody, one of our integrators, he emails me and says, "Hey, I got... I'd done this cool integration with Ignition, we should show it off somehow." And I said, "Man, that's perfect timing. Let's do that." So let's welcome out Donald Bailey, Senior Digital Transformation Engineer from Gray Solutions.

15:48
Donald Bailey: Thank you, Travis. How are you guys doing? A little after lunch, what, downtime here, right? So Travis, you're always showing us and wowing us some really cool gadgets and things. Definitely a tough act to follow. But today, I think I got you beat.

16:07
Travis Cox: But before we do, let's make sure we get this ah, yeah, that's displayed on the... There we go.

16:13
Donald Bailey: There we go.

16:13
Travis Cox: There we go.

16:15
Donald Bailey: All right, cool. Alright. So I'm Donald Bailey. I'm a Senior Digital Transformation Engineer with Gray Solutions. Throughout my career, I have had a passion for giving our customers Digital Transformation solutions that help with operator effectiveness and situational awareness to solve their most challenging issues. And Gray Solutions shares that passion. We are a company that lets curiosity lead and we never stop asking, "What if?" And that attitude allows us to say, "We can," in an industry where sometimes you often get, "We can't." So we take after Travis here and well... Hi, Spot, how are you? Oh, it's nice to see you too. Can you say hi to the crowd?

17:14
Travis Cox: Welcome Spot, everybody.

17:21
Donald Bailey: So, Spot, what are you doing here? You have something you wanna show us back here?

17:36
Travis Cox: I wonder what's under there, man?

17:37
Donald Bailey: Yeah. I don't know. I guess we're about to find out.

17:41
Travis Cox: The suspense is killing me.

17:44
Donald Bailey: Whoa. It's Hawt Spot. So I think we should wake her up and introduce her to you guys and "can" starts here. So as she's doing her thing here, what you may notice is this isn't PowerPoint, this is Perspective. Everything you see up here in this demonstration is done through Perspective with Ignition as the backbone. And we'll talk a little bit more about how we did that later. When Travis clicked that button, he started an event-driven instruction to send the robot out front and have a little fun with us. So everybody say, "Hi."

18:34
Speaker 2: Hi.

18:35
Donald Bailey: Oh wow. That's a hot crowd out there, right? Alright, so everybody smile, we're gonna take another picture. There you go. Alright. So, yeah, you're right, Hawt Spot. It is a tough crowd to look at sometimes, but lots of fun. No less.

19:06
Travis Cox: All right, go ahead. Good info.

19:07
Donald Bailey: Alright, so let's talk a little bit about these robots. These are the autonomous robots from Boston Dynamics. They're fully autonomous, agile. They can go virtually anywhere a person can. They avoid obstacles, recover from slips and falls, they can even climb stairs and go downstairs. Sometimes they fall downstairs, but we try not to let that happen. They'll have about 90 minutes of run time and lots of sensors and integration that can go with them. So some of the things you see here today, this is Spot CAM. It's a 4K camera that also has thermal imaging, as you just saw. It can rotate 360 degrees. It can play sounds and do all sorts of other kind of visual analytics and diagnostics that you may want it to do.

20:00
Donald Bailey: This on the back is a LiDAR system that gives you a very broad range to see what's going on from a robot's perspective and the environment around them. And we'll see a little bit about what that produces later. And there are some other sensors too. One that we don't have currently but is available is for acoustical detection of gas leaks and things like that. Now, over here on Spot, you have the fully mobile arm that has 6 degrees of freedom, about a 1 meter reach, can pick up 11 pounds, can drag 25 and has all sorts of neat things, including a camera in the middle. Say, "Hi." Alright, so we're gonna go ahead and send these back, let them take a rest for a minute and talk about how we can integrate robots into your workflow. The next button down there.

21:05
Travis Cox: Got it. I gotta control this thing here.

21:09
Donald Bailey: It's a bad part about doing it in Perspective, no clicker. So how do you integrate your robots into your workflow? We often encounter customers with legacy systems, could be old, all the way up, with a combination of new technology as well. We have workforces that are either limited resources available to them. Maybe it's high demand. Maybe it's an aging workforce. And we could have conditions at a site that are maybe not the best for humans to habitate or to work in.

21:49
Donald Bailey: So where do these robots fit in, these peripherals, if you will? They give you an ability to go out, have repeatable, consistent inspections. They can read gauges, they can do all sorts of things, and all that information comes back digitally, and you can actually do something with it. You can do advanced, maybe, picture analytics on that, to get information out of that and record it into history. It puts information at the fingertips of those people who need it to keep your operations running. It augments our workforce. It allows jobs, like routine inspections, things like that, to be done by something that can go out and do it whenever you want it to go do it. You don't have to spend human power and time to go do that. And then you can focus those resources on more high-value things that can really bring value to your company. And safe conditions. These can go just about anywhere a human can. And as such, they can go in tunnels, they can go over uneven terrain, in and around things that may not be the best for humans to go through. And so you take the human out of the equation and increase your safety barrier there.

23:27
Donald Bailey: So we're gonna have Hawt Spot go and actually perform an inspection of the stage. And so you may be asking, as we go through this — go to the next slide — "Where do Ignition and Gray Solutions fit into this equation?" In learning about Spot and what Boston Dynamics has provided, we started asking, "Well, okay, this is great technology, and Boston Dynamics has done a fantastic job of putting together all the stuff around it to make this work, but how can we extend that? How can we make it event-driven so that we can tell it to go do something versus just scheduling it to go do it on its own, whenever?" And that led us to ask, "What if? What if we wrap the Spot SDK that Boston Dynamics provides in a web service and leverage the rapid development and open flexibility of Ignition to build this prototype?" And you kinda see it. The architecture back there, it's just basic Ignition. I've got a REST web server in the middle, and that runs the SDK that talks to the dog. Go to FETCH.

24:52
Donald Bailey: So I talked about the LiDAR earlier. And here, you see a map of this stage. This is what Hawt Spot sees. This is all a point map of everything that it did. Go to the second screen there real quick. This is a close-up. You can see the path that it took, and you can even see when we recorded this, there are people standing there. You can see the people standing. So Travis, it looks like it's telling us we've got a problem. Oh wow. This is not cold water. That looks pretty hot. "Hey, Spot. Can you come out here and take care of that for us, please?" Thank you. So as Spot comes and takes care of this, I'll go back to this real quick and go to this slide. And as you see here, we've got a picture of just the stage area. You can see a lot of detail, the curve walls on the side, everything like that, but these are the three inspection points. So Mr. cameraman over there and some of the crowd in that area. A picture of the clock telling me how long I can or can't talk. And then finally, the picture of the bottle that you saw earlier. That ought to do it. Great job, Spot. Let's give him a hand.

27:02
Donald Bailey: So, as Travis said earlier, we don't have the attitude of "Can't." We like to say, "Yeah, we can do that. We'll figure it out. We'll make it work." And with Ignition, this is our breakthrough. This is what can make us find that new technology, that new innovation, and bringing the future to today, and that's what Gray Solutions is all about. Now, I'd be remiss if I didn't say thank you to a couple of other people who have really been instrumental in helping us get this together. Sam [Janes], Anya [Deaton], our dog whisperers.

27:48
Donald Bailey: Everything you saw Hawt Spot do today was done through Ignition. Anya was backstage as a safety precaution, just in case something went wrong, to take control of the robot. We never want to operate these without some sort of safety protocol in the background to stop it when things may not work right. So thank you, Sam and Anya.

28:18
Donald Bailey: And that is where curiosity led.

28:21
Travis Cox: Thank you so much, Donald, for that. Let's give him another round of applause, please.

28:30
Donald Bailey: Should we bring our robots back out and let them give a bow?

28:32
Travis Cox: Let's do that.

28:38
Donald Bailey: I'm gonna let Anya drive her this time.

28:54
Travis Cox: While these are coming up here, these dogs will be out in the hallway after the session today. If you guys wanna interact with them, go up and ask questions from the dog whisperers, about what they can do. I really appreciate Donald and the team coming here to show us this amazing stuff. So one more round of applause, everybody, please.

29:14
Donald Bailey: Thank you. Spot, give 'em a bow. Sometimes they act a little funny.

29:24
Travis Cox: So hopefully... Oh, look at this. Oh yeah. Oh yeah.

29:52
Donald Bailey: Thank you, Spot.

29:53
Travis Cox: So as you can see here with these two examples, I hope that all of you got a little inspired today. Honestly, never say no. There's a will, there's a way. We could build any kind of solution, and there's just amazing stuff that we can do and challenges that we can solve for our customers. And I just love this community because we get to see this cool stuff all the time. Thank you so much. And that's it. So if you have any questions, we're here.

30:24
Travis Cox: So there goes... We have some mic runners. If you have any questions, please hold up your hand, and we will get to you. Alright, there's one down here.

30:34
Audience Member 1: A quick question. Just, what was your time on implementation? So kinda walk us through your process of, like, you had an idea, and then how long did it take you to bring it to fruition?

30:44
Travis Cox: We did it yesterday. Really. No.

30:53
Donald Bailey: So for this project, what you saw in front of you probably took about three months total calendar time to put together, make it work, and do the integration. A lot of testing with the SDK, a lot of learning the SDK, for one, because it was new to all of us here. And so once we got that done, the Ignition part was easy. We just had to program the REST APIs to do that.

31:26
Travis Cox: There's a lot of... Their SDK has a lot of functionality. It's pretty expensive. So bringing that all in, integrate that with Ignition. Once it was figured, that part's pretty easy to do. Yeah.

31:37
Donald Bailey: And we have plans for the future on that as well.

31:41
Travis Cox: Absolutely. Other questions? Come on. Don't be shy. Right there.

31:54
Audience Member 2: Hey, Travis. So I understand you're into home automation.

31:56
Travis Cox: I am.

31:57
Audience Member 2: So I've been doing it, this stuff also since the '80s, before it was called home automation. So there are some technologies out there. Do you have a name for Insteon? That was a joke.

32:08
Travis Cox: Do I have a...

32:09
Audience Member 2: Insteon.

32:09
Travis Cox: No.

32:09
Audience Member 2: When you say never say no.

32:11
Travis Cox: No. We can bring it in... We can bring everything in. Come on. Over there.

32:23
Audience Member 3: So I actually had two just quick questions for you. And they don't necessarily relate to this, but I'm hoping you're a good one to ask. Do you guys have plans to integrate to Python 3 and be able to leverage all the libraries in Python 3?

32:36
Travis Cox: Ooh, the infamous question.

32:42
Travis Cox: So that question gets asked a lot. There's a gentleman over here in the right. Carl [Gould, Inductive Automation CTO]? Yeah, he can raise his hand. You can just go, say hi to him and go talk to him and plead your case. But no, we've been, of course, looking at being able to... Whether it's Python 3 or other implementations, bring that into Ignition. There is some work that have to be done in order for that to happen. But we do wanna go somewhere. Just don't have clear plans as to what that is. The Jython 3 spec is, I don't think, anywhere near ready for bringing it into Ignition. But go talk to that guy over there.

33:17
Audience Member 3: No, I appreciate that. The only other question I had was the Perspective app, cameras, GPS function, everything like that, is there any plans or even possibility to leverage that from the browser side rather than having to use the Perspective app?

33:34
Travis Cox: Well, so some of that can be in the browser. You can... Like uploading files and stuff. What the browser does support itself. That's also why we built Workstation, though. So Workstation as a wrapper around that, the browser is embedded inside of it, and allows us to get access to the OS so that we could integrate with things like... We don't have it yet. Integrating with the... Being able to work with the local file system, talk to serial devices or bluetooth devices, those kind of things. We would love to do that. Like, native apps for iOS and Android, they do get access to those sensors, that's there, because their apps are hooked into that kind of stuff. So with browsers, we get what browsers give us. And I think GPS is there in some capacity, but other things, we don't necessarily get. Yeah. Good questions. Question over there?

34:26
Audience Member 4: The images from Spot, or that Spot captured into Ignition. One, how did you do that? And two, are you doing any analysis on it, like gauge readings and things like that?

34:39
Donald Bailey: So right now, we're not doing any analysis on them. We're just taking the pictures and bringing them in. Everything you saw came from the robot. And basically, there's an SDK that allows me just to say, go point this camera somewhere, take the picture, and save the file to my laptop or wherever I wanna save it, and that's what we did. And so once I did that, I used... What is it? A web service or something...

35:06
Travis Cox: Web Dev?

35:06
Donald Bailey: Web... Yeah. That allowed me to create the path for it, and it always knew where those pictures were.

35:16
Travis Cox: Down there.

35:19
Audience Member 5: You showed support for visionOS as a VR solution. Is there any plans to support the Meta Quest as a more cost-effective solution?

35:30
Travis Cox: Yeah, I totally forgot. [Inductive Automation Chief Solutions Architect] Kevin McCluskey will get mad at me. 'Cause he's like, "We don't want people just to know that it works only on iOS." So we have a Quest too here, a Quest as well. It does work there. It has to be... The app has to be side-loaded though. That's the only problem right now on there. But it does function... And of course, Perspective being a browser, it does work on Quest. Now, deeper integration, like with visionOS, we could have that deep integration with the gestures and the actual addition to the app where we can open up multiple frames and specify where we want those to go. We are gonna be working on that. And I think we'll be seeing what we can do here as well so that there are just more options for people to easily open it up and get access. Yep. Question over here.

36:15
Audience Member 2: So I know I have a serious question since what the question over there was outside the scope of this. UDTs. I'm assuming you use some UDTs in this whole process with today or not? But my question is more around UDTs and protecting intellectual IP. Right now, UDTs are not encrypted or anything, so anyone... If I'm an integrator and I install something for someone that has a UDT I have my team spends a month on. I can't protect it. They have access to the source code, and they can just post it to your forums and that and give away something my team worked on. Is there any thoughts on protecting that stuff in the future?

36:58
Travis Cox: It's a very tricky question to answer, because Ignition, fundamentally, is designed to be a platform that is open like that, that has designer included, that customers can get access to. So when you talk about restricting those parts, the config, obviously, protect the IP that makes a lot of sense, it's the ways that which we could potentially go about that in the future would be maybe through a module adding resources to Ignition, and that could be read-only, those kind of ideas where we're looking. But we would still like to have the bulk of that... It's not like you're gonna go and say, "Oh, now let's make this whole thing encrypted where nobody can get into the server at all." We still want the customer to be able to manage a server and add and do what they need to do, but also have modules that provide the protected IP parts of the system. So that's the idea. Not quite there yet, but that's the idea. Right there.

38:02
Audience Member 6: What was the application that you solved with the dog robots?

38:10
Donald Bailey: So the use case that originally came out, that sparked the idea, is a customer wanting to move samples around. And it's something that you don't necessarily have a schedule when that happens, potentially. So you wanna be able to deploy the dog at will: go pick up something, bring it back. There are plenty of other use cases like that. For instance, let's say in the future, you have some alarm somewhere, maybe you've got the acoustical sensor on the back, got a future update to it that will allow it to look at bearing noise and stuff like that, you could deploy the dog to go out, do an inspection on demand, get that data and send it back to the guy at the console to do something about it, or dispatch maintenance.

39:05
Audience Member 6: Is that first customer actually using these dogs and to get those samples?

39:09
Donald Bailey: Absolutely.

39:11
Travis Cox: It's all about being able to have that single pane of glass for the operators. The folks like Sam and Anya here are trained to work with this. Not every operator out there is going to be trained. So when you can create the missions and have that safe environment established, being able to not only dispatch but to get information so that we can pull it back in system, have that one interface as well as to do alarms and things that are already established within the control system. We're not having separate disparate systems here, pulling it all together. That's really the most important use case. That's what customers want. A question over there.

39:52
Audience Member 7: Great demonstration, by the way. Fantastic. Ballpark figure, how much are the dogs?

40:00
Donald Bailey: Sam, I'll let you...

40:04
Sam Janes: Probably about $250,000 to $300,000.

40:08
Donald Bailey: Hold on.

40:10
Sam Janes: You can put about $250-300 [thousand] for one of these installs.

40:16
Travis Cox: There's just a little bit of money up here, a little bit. Especially when they got shipped to the office, and I was responsible for it.

40:26
Donald Bailey: Yeah.

40:30
Travis Cox: Any other questions? There's one up there. Thank you for pointing 'cause it's hard to see up there.

40:41
Audience Member 8: Now, I have two questions. One is, do they follow the three laws?

40:47
Travis Cox: I hope so.

40:47
Donald Bailey: Yes. Yes, they do. Provided they got them all.

40:50
Travis Cox: They do.

40:50
Donald Bailey: Boston Dynamics sees to that.

40:52
Audience Member 8: Okay. Now, you're covered underneath State Farm, or GEICO?

40:58
Donald Bailey: Well, I can't answer that.

41:01
Donald Bailey: Lords of London maybe?

41:02
Donald Bailey: Yeah.

41:08
Travis Cox: I see. Any other questions? Cool. Oh, there's one back there.

41:21
Audience Member 9: Great demonstration. Thank you. Is it possible to take the video stream from the dog and put that right into the vision system that you had.

41:35
Donald Bailey: So you can't stream it directly because of all of the I-frame things with HTML, but there is an SDK portion that will allow you to capture video, and I believe there's one that will actually allow you to capture that stream and pull it in. It's not something we've explored yet, but there's... Like you said, there's a lot of capabilities there. I know I can capture video and audio, for that matter, and save it directly to my laptop.

42:09
Audience Member 9: Thank you.

42:09
Travis Cox: Yeah. It does... I think you can't open in a separate tab and have that streaming there next to it, but there's just the core's restrictions that doesn't allow it to go inside of it and not inline frame, unfortunately. There's another one over... Oh, there was one over there. I'm gonna do that one and then we'll come over to you.

42:27
Donald Bailey: Okay.

42:30
Audience Member 10: So accessing the Perspective browser would remove your ability to scan barcodes. Do you guys have the interest and expanding into the augmented reality space, allowing you to actually interact with the environment, 'cause the browser, I don't believe, uses the tools to do that.

42:46
Travis Cox: Well, I could tell you. I don't... There's, certainly, no concrete plans, but that is a target of ours is to figure out what more we can do with devices. Like the visionOS, what more we can do with that. We'll start with our native app and add some easy functionality there, but get the feedback and see where it can go. So that would be awesome, to have more direct integration. So nothing on the road quite yet.

43:12
Audience Member 11: So this is more about the SDK itself. Is that something that's hosted locally on your network? And if the robots are delicate enough, is there a reason why we didn't have one of those robots rip Travis' shirt off on stage for the 10-year anniversary?

43:27
Donald Bailey: So again, going back to the three laws, we don't wanna do that to Travis. If we miss, Travis could get hurt. And we don't want that. So Travis, you're welcome. The SDK, currently I'm running in a Docker image on my laptop. Long-term, you could run it just like we're doing it now, on a server, some image in the cloud even. The SDK is available from Boston Dynamics. You can go look at it if you want.

44:00
Travis Cox: The SDK is a Google part our stream service. So the idea... Right now, they have a lot of... They have Python implementations. And we just simply wrapped up in REST API. However, the long-term plan would be to help them build the module that integrates directly with the SDK, and so that stuff's added to Ignition without having to write any code or any of that kind of stuff, have it directly in part of Ignition. So maybe like Event Streams. And the cool stuff coming to 8.3 we can hook it into those systems. Alright, well, that is the end of our time. Appreciate it. Thank you so much.

Wistia ID
5j0xcy8ku4
Hero
Thumbnail
Video Duration
2684
Subtype

Speakers

Travis Cox

Chief Technology Evangelist

Inductive Automation

Donald Bailey​​​​

Senior Digital Transformation Engineer

Gray Solutions

ICC Year
2024.00
Build-A-Thon Rachel Bano Tue, 10/29/2024 - 15:41

Behold, another Build-a-Thon is upon us, complete with all the intrigue, feats of daring design, unexpected surprises, and singing that usually accompany such a monumental event. This year, teams from two top integration companies will battle to see who can design the best Ignition project. Don't miss all the excitement of witnessing the crowning of a new Build-a-Thon champion live at this educational, one-of-a-kind competitive SCADA event!

Transcript:

00:17
Kent Melville: Hey guys.

00:19
Kevin McClusky: How are you doing back there?

00:19
Kent: I'm hungry. Do we have any snacks?

00:23
Kevin: We just ate lunch.

00:25
Kent: I'm hungry now.

00:29
Travis Cox: Alright, Kent. Here you go, buddy.

01:00
Otto Mation: In a land where possibilities are unlimited and integrators can become warriors who forge alliances with dragons, comes the next chapter in our Build-A-Thon saga where smart people fight over an orange jacket. We first met our 24 teams of innovative integrators on an arduous adventure of automation through The Lands of Ignition, where they overcame challenges that included answering Ignition version trivia at the Tree of Editions, uncovering secret passwords at CSS Cove, and unscrambling Persnickety Puzzles at Perspective Peninsula. They won our hearts as they quickly answered Ignition trivia using brains, not brawn, to move boulders to reveal secret passwords and out-style a quick-witted quill. Two teams ultimately emerged victorious from this quest, and now our heroes will face the Mysteries of Machination like MQTT, data modeling, and visualization. They'll have their boundaries pushed, their mental strength challenged, and their driving skills put to the test. Which one of these teams will effectively use innovation and teamwork to win the coveted orange jacket? Which hopefully it fits this year. Prepare yourself for a showdown like no other and remember that the destiny of these challengers will be in your hands.

02:39
Kent: Hello, everyone. Welcome to the 2024 Build-A-Thon. Who's excited to be here? Yeah? Awesome. Well, I am your host, Kent Melville, and I will be walking you through this, the premier event in the world of competitive SCADA. And you'll notice that I am alone on stage. No Travis, no Kevin. That is by design. In fact, I made a little bit of a deal with them. I said, for the promo video that we showed a little bit earlier, if I sit in the car seat, which obviously was their idea, not my idea, if I sit in the car seat and have to pretend like I'm a child, then you have to let me do the live event solo. And they agreed, but do I take them at their word? No, I don't trust those guys as far as I could throw them.

03:22
Kent: And so on the side of the stage, I have actually constructed barriers to keep them out. So hopefully we're gonna have no issues today, and it's gonna be a wonderful, safe event. But I really liked that video we just watched, which introduced you to what happened back in July. We had over 20 Premier Integrators compete in our Build-A-Thon elimination challenge for a chance to come and be here on this stage. Out of those 20, only two remain. And without further ado, I would like to introduce our competitors for this year's Build... Wait, what is happening? Oh no, this better not be Travis and Kevin trying to crash the party. Oh my goodness.

04:06
Kevin: Kent, you didn't think we'd really be able to keep us away, did you?

04:14
Kent: I hoped. I hoped we could keep you away.

04:15
Travis: This year's theme is Breakthrough. You think that's gonna stop us from breaking through?

04:24
Kent: Guys, this is a huge mess. Who's gonna clean this up?

04:28
Kevin: Kent, I think you know who.

04:28
Travis: Come on, Kent, those blocks aren't gonna clean up themselves, buddy.

04:33
Kevin: Well, we're happy to be here.

04:35
Travis: Thank you.

04:35
Kevin: Ready for the real show? I do feel a little bit bad though. I mean, look at him over there. Hey, Kent, do you want some help?

04:49
Kent: Yeah, that would be great, guys.

04:50
Travis: I think we could help you out a little bit.

04:51
Kevin: Yeah. All right, I'll hold this side.

04:54
Travis: Yeah, he has to come over here. There you go. One block at a time, Kent?

04:58
Travis: Wow, this is really; you're doing a great job.

05:01
Kevin: Have you ever cleaned anything up in your life?

05:05
Kent: Guys, it's gonna be great.

05:06
Travis: Oh my god.

05:07
Kevin: Well, I think we just, we got to get some help from somebody else.

05:13
Travis: Yeah, like this is gonna take too long.

05:13
Kevin: Yeah.

05:14
Travis: Oh my gosh.

05:15
Kevin: All right.

05:15
Travis: Guys, can we get some team members to come in here and help clean up the mess that this guy over here, Kent, made? Oh my goodness.

05:23
Kevin: Oh man.

05:25
Travis: Well, I think it is time, while Kent's doing his thing over there, to unveil the panels for this year's Build-A-Thon. What do you guys think?

05:36
Travis: Let's do it.

05:37
Kevin: Yeah, we're pretty excited about this. Right over here, we give you...

05:42
Travis: We give you a convenience store.

05:43
Kevin: Convenience store. And for panel number two, we give you another convenience store.

05:52
Travis: Another convenience store.

05:55
Kent: Well, hey guys, that's nice. They're already powered up and ready to go.

06:00
Kevin: Yep, isn't that convenient? No need to gas it up.

06:06
Travis: That's right. We don't need to get these folks all pumped up 'cause they can see that this is a convenience store, a model convenience store, and gas station that was made by none other than our official hardware sponsor, the Build-A-Thon. Give it up for Opto 22, everybody.

06:22
Kent: So what you guys are saying is that our competitors have some prizes in store for us today?

06:29
Travis: Oh my god.

06:32
Kevin: Oh man. Kent, yeah. Just go back over there. All right. Well, while he does that, we are gonna have the folks from Opto 22 actually come out here and tell you a little bit about these panels that the competitors are gonna be using today. So with that, Vincent Hoagland and Terry Orchard, please come out to the stage.

06:56
Travis: Oh, this side, this side.

07:02
Terry Orchard: Thank you, guys. Yeah, this actually really started for Opto back in 2022 when you guys at Inductive Automation called up Opto and asked us to fabricate these panels for the Build-A-Thon three years ago. So we designed it, we built it, we controlled it, and then we returned again for the panels in 2023. And here we are, ICC 2024, and we're back again, this time with the idea of a convenience store or the Epic C store. So this is something we're familiar with that needs monitoring control. So we took that idea and scaled it down for the stage. I started by just modeling the whole concept in Fusion 360 design software, and then actually 3D modeled and 3D printed each of the different components on our Bambu X1. So everything from the street lamps and the fuel pumps, the cars, even the conveyor tracking gears were all 3D printed just specifically for this panel.

07:54
Terry: Then we leveraged the rest of our team here at Opto, and we had our in-house machinists build a frame that holds everything together and had our graphic designer create the images that you guys see in the car wash and in the C store. And we even stuck some little things in there. And then we finished it up with some dot addressable LEDs and really brought this all together into this sort of stage-worthy scale representation of a C store. So all of this is so that we can have something that our competitors have been working with to demonstrate their ability to show monitoring control. They've been working with these panels, and now we have them on stage. But over the last three years, the last three panels that we've put together for the Build-A-Thon, at the core, has always been this groov Epic. But what appears to be just a simple PLC is actually a lot more. So for that, Vincent?

08:41
Vincent Hoagland: Indeed it is, Terry, a lot more than just a PLC. So once Terry and his team actually assembled and built the panel, and then we had our master electrician actually land all the I/O points and wiring all through these I/O modules in the PLC, I got to work working with the embedded software that's on the Epic. First, of course, I had to get into the device through groov Manage. I commissioned it, created some accounts, set up security, certainly the networking, any firewall configurations. Then I grabbed my control program and started to build a control strategy that took all the I/O from the C store in through these I/O modules and then created the runtime that does execute in real time.

09:23
Vincent: Next, I identified various variables and I/O on the system and decided which ones I wanted to make public through the built-in OPC UA server. Then I just turned on Ignition Edge, already pre-installed, got the gateway up and running, and then licensed it with Ignition Panel Edition, Ignition Edge Panel Edition. Best part? Then I go into designer, and I crafted UDTs to basically model this entire C store into logical subgroups and then used MQTT transmission to publish those up. With those same UDTs, I actually built an HMI front panel right here, and that is Perspective running on the Epic right on the front panel. Thank you.

10:10
Vincent: Now, once I have all my UDTs completed, I have MQTT transmission from my friends at Cirrus Link Solutions, and now I'm publishing those UDTs up over this cellular radio that's over here on the side, only on change. Indeed, there are no inbound firewall ports open on either the router or the Epic. That means this C store is 100% secure. So, what can you do with all of these UDTs? Well, first, we have a car wash here, and we can start and stop the car wash and also monitor its rinse, wash, and dry cycles. We'll see that. Down here, we have an underground fuel tank, so we can monitor the fuel in the tank and we can also publish prices for that fuel right up on the display. Looks like somebody's already working through it. Once we have that, I also have here a temperature probe, so I always know what the temperature of the C store is, and indeed, we also have code running in the Epic that is reaching out to a weather API and pulling back the current conditions for wherever the C store is, its location, however that was configured.

11:21
Vincent: So once I have all that, I've also got all my lighting zones here that can be controlled, so that's all available in the UDTs. And finally, we actually have an energy monitoring module on this system. It's wired up to CTs, and we're getting real-time power. We're getting energy consumption, and all of those are available in the UDTs as well. So, Terry, I'm super excited to see what these teams are gonna put together, building their Ignition system with the C stores. And thank you guys.

11:53
Travis: Thank you, Benson and Terry. All right. This is definitely one of the coolest panels we have, and it is gonna be outside. We're gonna be upstairs after the session here, so you can see it up close and personal, and as they said, there are a couple Easter eggs in there, so go and look very carefully inside of the artwork that's there, but we're super excited to have it here this year.

12:20
Kevin: Yeah, it's pretty exciting. Next, we're gonna tell you a little bit about how to vote, right? So you're gonna need to vote at the end of the session, but it's kind of a lot of work to do this. Kent does actually do a pretty good job. Do you guys want to bring Kent back out? Should we do that? Okay. All right. All right. Kent, stop being lazy over there and come back out here and do your job.

12:43
Kent: All right. So how do we choose winners for the Build-A-Thon? It's not us. It is you, and so we are gonna be having all of you vote today, and so that you know what you're doing when we get to the end of this thing, we wanted to introduce you to voting now, early on. And so, how do you vote? Well, it's gonna be a poll in the ICC app. So hopefully you've downloaded the IA Events App, and if you go into that right now, you can actually go down to the bottom. You can go to agenda, and from that agenda, make sure you're on today, and one of the first events you'll see there is the Build-A-Thon. If you go ahead and click on the Build-A-Thon event and you scroll all the way to the bottom, you're gonna see some polls.

13:30
Kent: And is everybody seeing polls? Anybody there? Yeah? Good. All right. I want you to click on the first poll, just the first poll right now. You'll notice there is no poll; that is the actual voting. You can't vote yet until you see what the teams have actually built. We're watching you guys. So the way that you're gonna do this, for the first one, just for practice, I want you to go into the app. First one, I want you to vote for your favorite convenience store. Now, Travis and Kevin both like Buc-ee's from Texas, but if you are Team Kent, you're gonna vote for 7/11, but you guys can vote for whatever your favorite is. All right. I heard the booze for Buc-ee's. Thank you. Thank you. I needed the support.

14:07
Kent: All right. All right. Where are we here? So you'll be voting, and yeah, you should be good to go. We will be doing another practice for that second poll in a little bit, so if you weren't able to figure out this time, don't worry. Stay tuned. We'll be talking about it again. But let me tell you a little bit about what our challengers have been doing.

14:32
Kevin: Hey, Kent, Kent, you don't need to do that. Travis and I made a video.

14:37
Kent: You made a video? Guys, we talked about this. If I sat in that car seat, you were gonna let me run the show. I was gonna do it here at the live event.

14:43
Travis: Well, that's just showbiz, kid. Keep up.

14:48
Kent: You got to be kidding me.

14:51
Kevin: Kent, you didn't really think you can come between us and the Build-A-Thon, really?

14:53
Travis: Yeah, that's right. Let's roll that video.

15:04
Kevin: The challenge is to build a project to manage a fleet of convenience stores.

15:06
Travis: Each convenience store has a car wash, fuel pumps, lighting, refrigeration, environment, and energy monitoring.

15:13
Kevin: The stores have a local groov Epic PLC provided by Opto 22. The PLC program and data have already been designed. Each store is modeled as a single UDT that is published to a cloud MQTT server over MQTT Sparkplug from Ignition Edge running on the groov Epic PLC.

15:32
Travis: Your task is to develop a backstory about a fictitious owner and their plans to dominate the convenience store market and build an Ignition project from scratch to help them accomplish their goals. What is their plan?

15:43
Kevin: What requirements do they have?

15:45
Travis: What do they want to do and see?

15:47
Kevin: What does the architecture look like?

15:48
Travis: What is the rollout plan?

15:50
Kevin: The challenge gives you an opportunity to show off your Ignition skills.

15:54
Travis: The Ignition project must include all of the following: visibility into this and all future stores. Interaction with all three elements of the convenience store: starting a car wash, managing fuel prices and fuel level, and monitoring refrigeration unit. Lastly, the ability to commission a brand new store from the runtime.

16:12
Kevin: Be creative, and feel free to add any additional features you want. This is your opportunity to separate yourself from your competition.

16:38.4
Kent: Well, what do you think? Pretty cool? Awesome. All right. Well, I think it is about time that we actually bring our teams out. And so we are very excited to welcome out onto the stage, Team DMC. Give it up for them, guys.

17:00
Kent: Come on over. All right. Well, welcome, everyone. It is so good to have you in this Build-A-Thon this year. DMC is well known in the industry, but for maybe the few people who don't know who you are, could you tell us a little bit about DMZ? Or DMC. Am I saying DMZ? I'm so used to talking to architectures with all of you. DMC, tell us a little bit about DMC.

17:26
Brandon: Yeah, we are integrators based out of... Our headquarters in Chicago, Illinois. We have been around since 1995. We have offices now all over the country. I think 15 offices now from San Diego all the way up to New York. And, yeah, we love working with Ignition in helping our clients out.

17:46
Kent: Good answer. That is exactly what I want to hear. Awesome. Well, we are so glad to have you, and we'll be hearing from each of you here in a little bit. But for now, we'll go ahead and have you take a seat in your chairs back here. But give it up one more time for DMC.

18:00
Travis: Now, one thing to note about DMC is that this is their second time being up here on stage. I think this time they're out for some blood.

18:09
Kevin: Yeah, that's right. Last time they had the racing uniforms, right? And this time, if you remember a couple of years ago, they only lost by a hair. So they know what they're doing. They're the folks who've been part of this already. So that might be a leg up.

18:24
Kent: Yeah, I mean, they're in t-shirts now. They're relaxed. They're ready to go. Seems like they're confident. Should be good. But I hope they're not too comfortable, 'cause we do have an incredible other team. Please help me welcome out BIJC. Come on out.

18:46
Kent: Well, hey, thank you so much for being here. They're kind of local-ish. But for you guys, it was a little bit farther to come out this year, huh?

18:57
Jonathan: A few thousand miles, yeah.

18:57
Kent: Yeah, absolutely. We are very excited BIJC being our first international competitor in the Build-A-Thon, hopefully the first of many. But since you're across the pond, please tell us a little bit about BIJC. Where do you come from?

19:09
Jonathan: So we're based in the southeast of England. And we've got about 10 to 11 people, sort of relatively small company. But we've been working with Ignition since 2014 now and absolutely love it.

19:31
Kent: Well, absolutely great. We're very excited to have you, and small but mighty. And so we're very excited to see the projects that you guys have built. So with no further ado, we'll let you go ahead and take your seats. Give it up for BIJC.

19:45
Kevin: Yeah, it's small and mighty, and these teams went through the competition that you saw alluded to earlier. They're an amazing... Both of them are amazing sets of engineers here. We had a lot of really good folks who were part of that competition. I did wanna acknowledge everyone who participated. It was not an easy competition, and these folks are crème de la crop. So well done. BIJC back quite a ways with us as well. You heard 2014, Chris Taylor, he got the award earlier in our earlier session for the Community Impact Firebrand Award.

20:22
Kent: And give it up for Chris Taylor, everybody. Hopefully you saw him in the main keynote. So excited for the work that he's doing in the community.

20:28
Travis: I think these teams are fired up, Kent.

20:31
Kent: I think so too. And so now that we have all this momentum, let's talk about voting again. Alright, so real quick. I want you to pull out your apps, and I want you to prove to me that you know how to do this. You're gonna go once again to the ICC app. I'm even gonna do it with you here, okay? And then we're gonna go at the bottom. We're gonna go to Agenda. Make sure that you are on the 19th. You're gonna go ahead. We got a great hero image there for you showing the Build-a-Thon DMC vs. BIJC click on that. Scroll all the way to the bottom. You're gonna see a second poll. And this one is gonna ask you, What is your favorite convenience store snack? And the right answer for this one, it's an open book test here. I'm telling you guys all the answers to these things. But the right one is obviously the fruit snacks that I was eating in the promo video earlier. But you can vote for whatever you want. Go ahead and submit that. And you also can view the results. Thank you. 83 of you have already voted for what I told you to. You've got this down. Well done, everybody.

21:29
Kent: And it is fun. You can also look within the first one. I'm looking to see that people voted with me. 7/11. Oh, Buc-ee's! No! Buc-ee's has 143 to 138 7/11 votes. I guess you guys still have a little sway here. All right. But there will be a third poll that will be added, and I believe we're gonna be removing those other two to eliminate distractions at the very end. That's gonna be how you're voting for these teams. So now you know how to vote, but who should you vote for? In order to figure that out, we are gonna be having a series of three presentations from each team. You'll notice three competitors, and so each person will get a chance to present. The first two they can prepare for, but the third one is a bit of a twist where they're gonna have to do something live on stage in true Build-a-Thon fashion.

22:26
Kent: But which team gets to go first? That's the question. And to determine that, we will be doing our Build-a-Thon commemorative coin toss. And so we are gonna be welcoming our first presenters from each team. So, Sheila, please come on down. Jonathan, please come on down. And to make sure that this is fair, we're gonna tell you how I'm gonna do it, okay? I'm gonna flip it up into the blinding lights, and then it's gonna come down, and maybe I will catch it, but I'm gonna do my best. And then I will take it and flip, and whichever is on the top, we go with. Now this is not your typical coin. It is not heads and tails. Instead, you can see that this was the coin that we used for the very first Build-a-Thon with integrators competing. So shout out to Vertech and Flexware for really setting the stage for integrators in the Build-a-Thon. Give it up for those teams.

23:21
Kent: Alright. So as such, it's your second time here, so we'll let you go ahead and call it in air. You're gonna call Vertech or Flexware, and whoever wins the coin toss will choose whether they go first or second. Make sense?

23:36
Sheila: Yep.

23:36 Kent: Make sense?

23:37
Jonathan: Sure.

23:37
Kent: Alright, here we go. Kent, don't screw it up.

23:39
Sheila: Flexware.

23:40
Kent: I can't see anything. It's a redo. Hold up. But she said Flexware. That still counts. I can't see anything in the lights. It is Flexware. Alright. You called Vertech, correct?

24:00
Sheila: I said Flexware.

24:01
Kent: She said Flexware? She said Flexware? Help me out, crowd. Yes? Alright. I don't know what I'm doing up here. The light's blinding me, and I turned into a deer staring at the light. I can't do anything. What do you think? Are you gonna go first? Set the stage? Set the tone? Get the first impression? Or do you want that last say? What do you think?

24:17
Sheila: We wanna go first.

24:18
Kent: Going first. Bold move. I like it.

24:18
Kevin: Alright.

24:18
Kent: All right. Well, thank you, Jonathan. Go ahead and have a seat. Well, Sheila, stay up here. Stay up here. You're not done yet. Alright. So, for this presentation, you will be walking everybody through just an overview of your project. We are gonna be giving you eight minutes to go through it. You do have a timer right here, so you're gonna be watching that as it counts down. No pressure. No stress. And we're excited to see what you have built. And then afterwards, the next presentation will be a technical deep dive where we'll get to see a little bit more under the hood. But for this one, we really just wanna see all the cool features that you've rolled into this thing. So, you ready?

24:55 Sheila: Yeah. I'm excited to show you guys.

24:58
Kent: Alright. Well, we'll let you come back here. So, are you gonna have the laptop here to guide us through?

25:02
Sheila: Yep.

25:03
Kent: Alright. Well, take a seat. Everybody, give a cheer. Let's see if they've got some good stuff for us here. Alright. Take it away.

25:09
Sheila: DMC just did our first project for a villain, Gru and the Minions from Despicable Me. Gru and the Minions reached out to us to help them take over the world by dominating the convenience store market. Gru knew Ignition was the best platform for this job. Right now, they only have one store, but they want to expand their empire and have hundreds of stores this year. Also, during the design phase, they requested it to be easy to monitor stores and drive profitability. So, we kept those in mind as we built our project. Now, I'll show you how we implemented these requests.

25:54
Sheila: So, our first screen here is a map. Right now, we have our one store here, and the store icon tells us the status of the store. If it's red, there's an alarm. If it's yellow, it's unprofitable. If it's green, everything's good. If you hover over the store, you can get some more additional metrics about how the income and expenses are going. We can also, with this drop-down, click our store, and it'll automatically zoom in to show a closer view of where that store is. This pin right here will pin this in place, and clicking on here also opens up our side panel. Pinning it allows this to stay open as we move around our map.

26:47
Sheila: This side panel over here has additional controls and things to monitor. So, starting first, we have our fuel. You can see all of the prices here, and if you look at the model, you can also see the prices there. And these buttons over here allow us to change the prices of the fuel. So, we increased our price to $5.14. We also have our monitoring of the fuel level, which the simulation was turned off and is now... Is it on? To continue going through that as that's working... Oh, there we go. Now the simulation of fuel level is turned back on. And we also have the ability to refill some of our, when we run out of fuel. I'm gonna add 100 gallons. We'll do 1000, and then it'll show up more better. And that just changed our expenses. We just spent more money on fuel, and the fuel level changed.

28:06
Sheila: Over here, we have information on our freezer. This is the power the freezer compressor is using and the status of whether the freezer door is open or closed. When the freezer door is open, we have an alarm. As you can see, the freezer door also turns red on the model. Down here, we also have a summary of the weather. So, when you're monitoring remotely, you can see what the current weather at this convenience store is. Last but not least, we have everyone's favorite part of a convenience store gas station, a car wash. So, we're gonna run that for everyone.

29:03
Sheila: And then down here, we have a few more screens. Dashboards we'll come back to, but this will go to a dashboard already selected for this store. And then we have a screen for light controls. So, if we go here, you can see all of our lights are on. We have the buttons down here to turn all lights on or all lights off. But then you can also click on the specific light to control that individually. So, if I click on Epic Store right here, it turns that off. We can also click on one of these to turn that on and off. So, a nice, fun way to easily see which lights are on or off. And we're gonna leave them all off for now.

29:54
Sheila: Going over to our left navigation, we have our dashboard. Here you can click your store, set a date range. And this is where it's very easy to see all of our revenue and expenses. We have how much we've made from fuel, convenience store purchases, car washes. And we did some simulation to get all of this data. The convenience store data and buying fuel data wasn't part of the PLC, so we added some simulation for that. As well as the car wash, we ran that automatically over the last few days so that we had some historical data. Over here we have the amount of money we just spent on fuel and then our energy expenses for running this store.

30:55
Sheila: Our transaction tab goes through all of our transactions that we've had in the last six hours, which we could edit that up there as well. We have our car wash sales, store sales, gas sales, and gas expenses. You can see our gas expense that we just demonstrated earlier. And then there's summaries down below that add up all the transactions and total expenses below each table. Lastly, we have our energy. And we can see that we just turned off those lights, and the energy levels dropped down right over here. Continuing on in our left navigation, we have the store configuration. Gru and the Minions really care about expanding their empire, so we wanted to make it as easy as possible for them to add new stores. So when new stores come online, they're gonna show up here and make it really easy for them to add.

32:02
Sheila: Lastly, over here we have our alarm screen. You can see that the door was open earlier and previous fuel level low alarms. So all of that will show up here nice and easy. So that's a nice overview of our store. We can see now that the fuel level is no longer low; our store is green and profitable, so we're doing great. And that's an overview of our project. We hope you enjoyed it.

32:43
Kent: Well, great job. That was an incredible project and just less than a minute to spare. You used your time effectively. It was great. After Coin Gate, where I dropped the thing in staring at the lights, I did neglect to do one thing, which was to get to know you, Sheila. Sheila, we're excited we got to hear about DMC. We're excited we got to see the project. But what the people back home wanna know is: who is Sheila? Tell us a little bit about yourself.

33:09
Sheila: I'm Sheila. I work out of DMC's New York office. I've been working at DMC for like three years. Outside of work, I like to do a lot of running, into long-distance running. I also like to travel a lot. Right before this, I came from Budapest, which was fun. So nice little 20 hours of travel on Sunday.

33:36
Kent: Yeah, great way to be well-rested for the event. I love it. Yeah, dedicated. I like it. Awesome. Well, Sheila, thank you so much for introducing us to not just yourself, but to this incredible project. I was offstage, and the creator of the panel, Opto 22, they were talking about how impressed they were with the project. But they don't get to choose. You get to choose. We'll see if you guys were impressed with the project. But I'm also, when we have our peanut gallery here, they broke in. They might as well say something. Travis and Kevin, what did you guys think of the project?

34:06
Travis: Well, I got to say, it's incredible to think that this was built in just two days. So in the morning on Monday, we gave them a challenge, and two days later, a complete project from scratch was built. It's so cool to see.

34:22
Kevin: Yeah, I was impressed with a couple of unexpected directions, starting front and center with the map there and the scale, and planning for that scale was something that I wasn't expecting. And then the expenses, and just having that bottom line there to see, is this profitable? Is this not profitable right now? I thought those were really nice touches.

34:44
Travis: Absolutely.

34:45
Kent: Yeah, and I know that Gru has had problems with funding in the past for his empire, and so tracking his profit, very important. Sounds good. All right. Well, they're not the only project to see today. We do have another one. We are excited to see BIJC, what you have in store for us. And Jonathan, it's gonna be you that's doing our first presentation, right?

35:04
Jonathan: That's right.

35:05
Kent: All right. Well, I'm not gonna screw it up this time. We're gonna have you introduce yourself first. And so, yeah, Jonathan, tell us about yourself.

35:12
Jonathan: So I'm Jonathan. I've been with BIJC for seven years now and absolutely loving it. Fun fact about me: I'm a musician. I play about five or six different instruments and really enjoy it.

35:24 Kent: Well, there you go. I thought I was a musician, too, but everybody gave me terrible reviews for last night's performance. So next year it's just you, is what we're saying, right?

35:32
Jonathan: Fine. Yeah.

35:33 Kent: Anybody wanna see Jonathan next year? Yeah?

35:36
Jonathan: All right. Maybe. We'll see.

35:39
Kent: All right. Well, with that, you also are gonna get eight minutes to present. And so without any further ado, give it up for BIJC. Let's see what they've got.

35:51
Jonathan: So we were given this challenge by an eccentric businessman who wants to take over the world. His business name, Totally Epic Autos. The fact that it spells out the acronym of tea is completely coincidental. So he wants to take over the world with his convenience stores. And let's get cracking. Okay. So his first store didn't work out too well. You can see it here. It's in Boston. It's in the Harborview. And there is nothing there to see because that is now completely defunct. So unfortunately, tea is no longer available in Boston.

36:39
Jonathan: So let's take a look at the store. So we've got our HVAC control. We can see that we can change the temperature set points. He wants to take over the world, so we put it in metric as well as freedom units. So we've got the PID here as well. We can also turn that off if we just wanna view the temperature. If we wanna open the fridge door, we can do that here, and you gets a nice little animation to show that the fridge door is open. There you go. We get the alarm. It goes red, and that will close itself. He's measuring his energy because the less energy he uses, the more profit he makes. We've got some store statistics here, so that money he's making. And of course, we have the September employee of the month, Travis. Let's take a look at the banned list. I'm very sorry, Kent. You are banned. You're not allowed. I don't know what you did, but it was obviously quite bad.

37:38
Jonathan: So in the fuel station, again, because we want to take over the world, we have the opportunity to view it in the local currency, so they're linked up to a currency API. We take the price in USD, and that's what's stored in the database, but on the local store, it will show the correct prices. We have some statistics on all the pump information, so the money that they've made there, and we can change the fuel level if we want to. So let's say we take a delivery of 1000 gallons. We can say fuel is delivered, and that should bring it in. That brings an event into our events table that Lewis will tell you about a little bit later, and that's lovely.

38:23
Jonathan: Okay. So the car wash. Now, again, he has information about the money he's made there, but we have a timer, and this is dynamic, so however long the rinse cycles, the dry cycles, that will update whenever you need and will be the correct ratio. So let's take a look at what happens. So we get some bubbles. When we get to the rinse station, it goes underwater, and we get some dry. Now, if those animations don't conform to the guidelines within the advanced HMI handbook, I don't know what does. So we have some alarms. We have our journal. We have alarm configuration. Now, we can change these alarms on the fly. We don't need to go into the designer, so let's say that the anomaly trigger should be at a set point of false. We can then go back to our alarm table, and we can see that alarm has come straight back in, so a nice little feature there. And if we look at our store config, we've got some manual controls and some store status, so we can change the status of the store there.

39:35
Jonathan: So down at the bottom here, we have city information. We can change the price of the fuel. Amy will do that for you later. And one of the big things that we've done is the events table, so it's a single table in the database that is extensible. We can do whatever we like with it. And it doesn't matter what type of event goes in there; we can get all the information we need. So we can see, here loads of information. Whatever event it is, it just breaks down everything nicely. And if we extend that time, let's say we take a couple of hours off here, these numbers on the totals change, and it all looks good.

40:19
Jonathan: We also have along the bottom the information about your weather, wind speed, how much you've made over the last seven days, and the year to date. And of course, we can see where our store, the one Big Apple in New York, is; we can see that. We can click on it, and it takes us straight to our store. And that is about it.

40:42 Kent: All right. Give it up for BIJC.

40:51
KM: Two incredible projects, both very different, but both bubbly, so we like it. But Travis, Kevin, very interested in your thoughts on this second one.

41:00
Travis: Well, I wasn't expecting to be employee of the month. I work pretty hard for it, so it's pretty exciting to see.

41:05
Kent: I do feel a little bit attacked in that I get enough... What is the... Antagonism? I can't think of words today, but I get attacked by you guys all the time. But for you guys to throw me on the banned list...

41:21
Kevin: So, so right now, apparently Travis is team BIJC and you're a team DMC.

41:27
Kent: Yeah, absolutely. But we're not biased.

41:29.
Kevin: There were a couple of things that I really liked in that presentation. Some of the animations were nice flavoring on top, right? Obviously, they don't increase the functionality significantly, but they can really make a big difference for customer projects when they see that in terms of how it feels when it's delivered, especially when folks are showing it to somebody else or they're gonna give their users access to it. And I really like the fuel consumption or the amount spent and the mount consumed over the last few days there, is that you could see yesterday, you could see today, you got the buy charts there, that would give you an at a glance as a business owner, how is this performing?

42:06
Travis: Yeah, and the event tracking's really cool; just to be able to see all the events and be able know exactly what's happening, store owners need that.

42:14
Kent: And soon you guys will be using event streams in 8.3 to take all those events and send them up to Kafka or something amazing like that, right?

42:19
Jonathan: Yes.

42:21
Kent: Absolutely. Subtle plug for our product. No. But speaking of subtle plugs, no, a big thing that we do every year at the Build-A-Thon is we like to talk about this year's Exchange winners.

42:39
Travis: And that's right, Kent. The Ignition Exchange is near and dear to my heart, and it's really what makes this community unique because everybody's so willing to go and contribute and share resources they built with Ignition, including these two amazing teams right here.

42:51
Kevin: Yeah, and the Exchange was announced on this stage at the Build-A-Thon back in 2019, actually, the best Build-A-Thon ever.

43:00
Travis: Yeah. Why? Was it because you won?

43:03
Kevin: Yeah, he's a bit of a sore loser. I did win, but no, that year and every subsequent year since then, the Build-A-Thon, we've taken the opportunity to take the resources that are submitted in the course of the previous year before the Build-A-Thon, and pick out winners. And so this year is no different.

43:24 Kent: Yeah. So, let's get to that. Let's see these winners. Before we show the top three, which will be featured on the Ignition Exchange, we do have some honorable mentions. So let's go ahead and take a look at that. The first category is devices. And for this, part of what we wanted for the Ignition Exchange was a place that people could create templates and face plates based on specific equipment that they used all the time. And we've had some incredible submissions to the Exchange that do that. And we dream of a day where any hardware you could go buy off the shelf would have an equivalent template on the Exchange. We got a little ways to go. We're gonna rely on you, the community, to help us get there. But really wanted to give an honorable mention to this Cognex Vision Web Socket Demo, also the 1734 Animated I/O, and also the Mettler Toledo Library. All submitted by different members of the community. Thank you so much for participating. Wanted to give you a shout-out here. All right. Yeah, give them up.

44:37
Kent: And two more that fit this category that we really wanted to highlight. We also have this Compact Logix 5069 Animated I/O and also, of course, the groov RIO EMU Faceplates. And so give it up for these two as well.

44:56
Kent: All right. Well, next up is gonna be third place. So our first official winner of this year's Build-A-Thon Exchange Challenge is, let's take a look, The Jupyter Kernel. All right, well, this came from Andrew Geiger. And you may look at this and say, I don't know what that is. That's fine. You should go check it out. But what this does is this resource allows you to develop and run scripts for Ignition inside the JupyterLab Notebook environment. And so people have often wanted to do the actual experience of writing code in Ignition rather than doing that in our designer, doing that in a external IDE of some sort. This allows you to do that, and allows you to run the scripts and do all kinds of cool stuff all within Jupyter. So, if you are one of those power users that is constantly writing cool scripts to enhance the capabilities of Ignition, this is a mandatory resource to go check out. Give it up for Andrew Geiger.

46:05
Kent: All right. In second place, we have none other than this Historical Tag Analysis by Eric Gruber. This one is a, well, the other resource we just showed was this really complex resource that is gonna be really cool for a select few. Something that really made this one stand out is that this is a simple resource that could be used by everyone. And so what this is is it's a Perspective view that allows you to generate a hit list of historical tags using which ones have the most storage in a specific timeframe. So you can go and start not just looking at, oh, all my history, but I can start seeing which of my tags are generating the most history and start doing some analysis to go and check it out. And so we think it is gonna be really powerful for a lot of people. We see analytics and deeper analysis to your, into your projects really being a big focus in the industry right now. And so we love seeing resources along those lines coming to the Exchange.

47:06
Kent: All right. But now we are ready for first place for this year's Exchange Challenge. And so we give you the Task Toggler. Once again, we picked this one because this one actually has a very, very high level of polish. And the other thing is that this is just one of several very polished resources that came from Artech Integrated Solutions. And so what this one is, is it allows you to track notes and time spent on daily tasks, and as you can see, I'm scattered constantly up here. And so I need something to help me track my tasks throughout the day. This is a great example of how to do that. And it's built for mobile, highlighting the responsive nature of the Perspective app, and works in any browser. Artech not only created this but many other resources. And so please go to the Exchange and see there are other things, like one that allows you to group and reorder rows in the Perspective table, a PDF annotator, and many more. So, please help me give a round of applause for Artech Integrated Solutions.

48:23
Kent: All right. Well, it's time to do a deep dive. It's time to see behind the scenes how these teams have built these incredible projects. And we'll be going in the same order. So we're coming back over to DMC, and Nicoli, that means you're up. For the people at home, who's Nicoli? What do we need to know about you? And in fact, I think you may be familiar; it's almost like you've been here on this stage before, is that right?

48:49
Nicoli: Yeah, that's for sure. This is my second time. I think I'm on the other side of the stage though, so this is a little unfamiliar.

48:55
Kent: I didn't want you to feel too comfortable. Had to shake it up a little bit. Yeah. But yeah, who is Nicoli? Tell the people at home.

49:02
Nicoli: Yeah. I am a systems engineer from our San Diego office. I love Ignition, work with it all the time across a whole bunch of variety of projects.

49:14
Kent: Awesome. Engineer, a man of simple, concise statements. I like it. But he was really leaving time, 'cause we're gonna give you 10 minutes now to present behind the scenes how you built this incredible project. Take it away.

49:28
Nicoli: Yeah. So I really wanted to dive in and start by kind of explaining the how we implemented this navigation strategy. So we really wanted this map to drive navigation. And we started by just thinking of it being very flexible and driven by what tags are currently existing in our tag provider. So this map you see on screen and the ability to navigate to it is fully driven by basically what tags are existing in our backend. And we're popped into the designer now because we wanna... We only had 16 hours to sort of finish this project, but we want to give you a very authentic look into kind of how we were able to implement this. So, the first thing, we have a script that to generate our map is basically browsing our tags and looking for UDT instances that we've created for each of these stores. So, if more stores were to become available and be implemented into our tags, we would automatically generate them on the map, and we would also, they would show up in this search dropdown.

50:44
Nicoli: We also put a large emphasis on sort of different elements of CSS that we could include into our project, utilizing Ignition's built-in style sheet and style classes. There's a few different ones. You obviously saw this growing card. We really like the idea of having icons, but also the ability to get more details and kind of show more on screen when you're able to hover over this card. Some other notes: our menu is a little bit dynamic to give you some feedback of which one you're hovering on. And obviously we saw the car wash run earlier there. There's whole different levels. There's some that are a little bit more functional and nice for the operator to see, and then you can obviously implement stuff that is also more fun.

51:37
Nicoli: But how we ended up doing this is, if we take a look at the style sheet for our cards, you'll see that we implemented a class that, basically, we are hiding this black card with all the data behind our icon. How this is working is that we've basically forced this icon to be at the top left of this view. And what happens when it's not hovered is that we're basically scaling it to be zero in size. And this Z index is also hiding it behind the icon in front of it, and we simply scale it. So it's mostly being driven by these, like, three lines of CSS, and just implementing them in kind of the correct way can create this cool effect.

52:39
Nicoli: One other thing that may be difficult to notice is that when we're far out, the icons become small, and as you move in, the icon ends up becoming larger. This is somewhat built into the Google Map component that we used, but we implemented it a little bit differently. So, we basically wanted to really dictate the size of this. And so we also basically set minimum widths and minimum heights as well as maximums for the card. And basically, the CSS just creates a little bit more of a modern feel and reactive sort of environment for your project. As for this car wash, I'll run it one more time. This is just adding multiple layers of CSS on top of each other to sort of get this car going around feel, and a little bit of indicators on the colors and the bubbles as well. It's all just more layers of CSS. And we'll be publishing our project to the Exchange. So feel free to take a look after this presentation.

53:58
Nicoli: The next thing I wanted to talk about is that we are dynamically building all of our tags. So, Opto is pushing MQTT tags to us in in the engine, and we have a script in our gateway events that is basically always browsing for potential new MQTT tags and instancing our own UDT in our tag provider. We then implemented our own UDT that extends the Opto MQTT UDT to add a few more additional things. So, we get values like what latitude, longitude exactly we want it on the map. We store UUID to associate with all of our database data and some additional parameters. How this connects is just with a simple tag path pointing at the MQTT, like root UDT instance, and all the tags inside figure out their path from there.

55:06
Nicoli: We also wanted to note that on our, to also be very flexible, basically all of our views, pretty common practice for us is to pass in this single tag path that basically points to the UDT instance so that if we were to add more stores, we'll have zero configuration of these views going forward. I also wanted to highlight a bit how our SVG works for this lighting. We developed this SVG with open-source software called Inkscape. I'm no graphic designer, but I did my best to make it look somewhat reasonable. And what this is doing is it's binding to the different tags we get for the lights. So, if I turn all these lights on, you'll see them basically connect and show up on screen. And we're connecting to the individual shapes on this SVG to basically change the fill color. So, if I was to update what color we wanted the lights to be, I could do that all from one place and quickly update the project.

56:44
Nicoli: What then is happening on top of this SVG is that we are layering invisible flex boxes to basically act as our triggers for controlling the controls. So all of these invisible flex boxes on screen are configured with a script to basically change the status of the light. Cool. Hopping back real quick to our map, I just wanted to also point out that like we ended up deciding not to use a docked container for our sliding controls. What you'll actually see is that we are hiding it off screen right now, just utilizing some of the other styles we have access to. And so if I make the overflow visible, you'll see it off to the right. And just on, when we click on these icons, it will basically shuffle itself onto screen. And so when this is marked as hidden and you see it in the actual application, it's still on screen, but just hiding.

58:00
Nicoli: And we kind of liked implementing it without the docked container to have a little bit more flexibility in this. And ultimately, it doesn't take much to make this work. We added a bit of a transition to get the sliding effect, and we're simply driving a tag that is adjusting a transform on the view. So, if I change this to 600, which is what we set the width of it to, it will slide off screen. And it's all driven by either clicking on the icon or clicking on the map to get rid of it.

58:45
Nicoli: Lastly, I just wanted to also thank Opto 22 and Inductive Automation. Opto for their incredible PLC work and the whole mockup, also giving us plenty of documentation to make this work, and Inductive for this opportunity and the kind of just letting us hit the ground running with a gateway and database already set up.

59:06
Kent: Well, thank you. Yeah, give it up for Opto, right?

59:17
Kent: I am so glad this year that we have given the teams more time to do a deep dive and actually see how they built these projects. I was thoroughly entertained. Thank you so much for going through that. Travis and Kevin, what stood out to you guys?

59:31
Travis: Well, I gotta tell you, it's impressive to see the use of CSS in the project, right? To do all those little animations and polish and be able to transform that. So, and to be able to have that be available on the Exchange for everybody to be able to take advantage of, that's pretty awesome.

59:46
Kevin: That is really awesome. Yeah, I mentioned earlier that having some of that sugar that's on the screen, basically, it does make a project feel a lot more polished. DMC's project, absolutely, like that each of the mouseovers, everything that somebody might be used to inside a web application. If a new user's coming to this and they're wanting to interact with it, you hover over that car wash button; it has the little slide in that just makes it feel good, right? And I think that this project really feels good.

1:00:15
Travis: Absolutely.

1:00:19
Kevin: And it is built in a way that obviously there's a lot of expertise there putting into that that here's the CSS that everybody here can take advantage of; it's really cool to see.

1:00:27
Kent: That is really cool. All right, give it up for DMC. What a great presentation. Tough act to follow. But if anybody could do it, it would be Louis. Louis, tell us a little bit about yourself.

1:00:44
Louis: Okay. So I am one of our SCADA developers. I'm largely known as the Python guy around the office. If you look through any of our scripts and you find something doing 10 different things on one line, that's probably me. I'm a father of two, and I have an extremely understanding wife because it's actually my wedding anniversary today.

1:01:05
Kent: Happy anniversary.

1:01:06
Louis: And I'm here.

1:01:07
Kent: Happy anniversary. Hope you're watching.

1:01:11
Louis: It's fine. It's the ninth this year. She's told me emphatically, not next year. That's 10th, not allowed.

1:01:16
Kent: That's smart. I just hit my 10th, so I understand. It was a big deal.

1:01:21
Louis: But yeah, that's me. I'm a Python guy around the office. I've been using Ignition for how long, Charlie?

1:01:28
Jonathan: Four years.

1:01:28
Louis: Four and a half years now. Sorry, my youngest was born like two weeks before I started at this job. So as long as I remember how old he is, I know how long I've been working on this.

1:01:37
Kent: There you go. Well, speaking of counting, you are going to have 10 minutes here to give the people a deep dive into your presentation. Are you ready?

1:01:46
Louis: Yeah. Why not?

1:01:47
Kent: All right. Well, take it away.

1:01:49
Louis: Okay. So, first of all, I just want to put you all at ease. We do understand, with the color of our shirts and the fact we are, in fact, not at home, there is an element of danger with us. But we are surviving. It's all going well. So first thing I want to show off is that these screens were designed first to run full-screen in a 1080p environment. However, we understand that that is not always the case. And somebody might be running it on a laptop, whether they're out and about or traveling around. And two of the things we wanted to achieve was, one, that these panels we've built will work inside various different sizes and when both the lower bar and the top browser bar are there. But also, as you may notice, as they shift in and out, they get moved around and off the screen, but they are always active. We don't have to worry about any loading appearing or anything else like that.

1:02:49
Louis: So what I will do is, well, if I work from the back to the front, so we have, much like DMC, we are not attaching anything directly onto the MQTT tags themselves. We have a reference provider with a reference UDT through which we can add lots of extra little tags, extra little systems, little bits and pieces that we want just attached in there that all the stuff we want at the hub end but isn't necessarily needed at the edge where it's all collected. These get created through the front; there's a section on the front end where, when things appear, there's a couple of scripts that run that will generate the bits we need in the database to back these up and then fill them out as it goes through.

1:03:40
Louis: And speaking of the database, if I can make sure... Yeah, that's that one. We tend to use this website; it's called DBDiagram, and it's incredibly handy for just mapping out what you're going to have in your database. Very quickly, throw it all together. There's a markup language here called DBML that just allows you to get things up and see exactly what the shape of them are going to be before it ever touches the actual database. And every now and again, as we're kicking it about, we go, oh, hold on, we need an extra column here, we need an extra column there. Well, I do all of that in our design phase, and this website allows us to export out to several vendors, which just kicks out the script, we throw it at the database, and we have all of our tables in there with all the relationships put in place for us.

1:04:28
Louis: On these, we have decided to, we have our stores table, which stores all of the information related to those stores. So that's things like the latitude, longitude, where it is, the route path of our reference UDT, the size of the fuel tank that's underneath the store. And each of those belongs to a city, and our prices are all set on the city level rather than the store level. Same as each city might have a different fuel delivery truck size, and those are our default truck sizes that we use to run that front-end box that you saw. However, my favorite on these is our events table, and it's fairly simple; it's just storing when something happened, where it happened, and what it was in terms of a type ID. And our type IDs are built into ranges, so the 100 range is the car wash, the 200 range is the fuel pump, and so on and so forth.

1:05:28
Louis: But the real magic of this is the extra data column, which is just a regular old string. We are using ours to store various JSON objects, so when a car wash happens, we all know what the source was for that and how much it cost at the time. So that when it comes to calculating these prices and how much has been made, it's as simple as just scanning through those events and just calculating the cost and ripping it straight out of that extra data. The UI itself, as we've built it, I want to give a particular thank you to David Rojas. If I can bring this back up. So this little set of tabs at the top, that is an Exchange resource called the Simple Tab Control. We use that everywhere. It is so good for so many different reasons, and it drives so many of our projects. If we just want something up there to just tab across things, the man's done the work for us, so I want to say thank you.

1:06:34
Louis: Where am I on this? Lost my mouse. There we are. So the advanced style sheet as well allowed us to get all of our key frames in for all of the lovely animations you saw. We also stacked some extra little bits in here as well. We tend to collect together a lot of... Our classes are built out of... There's a style library called Tailwinds that gives us lots of little building blocks that we can use to collect together and just build out our nice, easy, simple-to-use classes that we can drop wherever we need them.

1:07:22
Louis: So I'm going to show you how the panel viewer works. There you are. So this is the panel viewer that you saw. And if I just quickly pop that to New York so we can get something going. There we are. And in here, it is simply an XY container with a couple of embedded views thrown inside it. Now, each one of these is keeping track of the current viewport height, with a little check in there because, unfortunately, in the designer, we don't always get our primary view width and height. It takes itself to zero, so we're just running at the moment off of that default size for the view itself. And then beyond that, it's just consuming that. We are building our offset, just to plug that straight into the middle, which just lands the page directly in the middle.

1:08:21
Louis: And the scale, now, these ones are currently set to; they're one-to-one, but using that viewer height, using the width and the height that is output by each view, we can just generate a nice, quick, easy scale and then plug all of that into our CSS Transform 3D, which just gets it where it needs to be. And as I said, this will work; if I start shrinking that down, it starts bringing itself down, back up again, and it just means that if I pop that back out to full screen, it sets itself to the as-designed sizes. And I think that is...

1:09:04
Louis: Oh, no, the events. Almost forgot. So talking of the events, as I said, these are simply just JSON strings that we attach to each event. And this is extremely extensible if they want to track something else. We realized as we were building through, we actually managed to completely forget storing transactions in the store. But it's cool. We're literally just straight into the event types. Well, there's a type 601 now. Let's get that in there. And then for backfilling this data, I just had to run everything into the event table and just attach all the data that we need. So we have, as you can see from these car washes, the remote start is when it comes off of here. If we were to run the Manual button, we'd get a new event that says, Manual button Start Source. The fuel pumps track when they start. Hopefully they stop at some point. And at the end of that, it will calculate how much fuel was used. So on our fuel level check, it's every time that fuel level goes down, assuming it's a fuel pump that started, we'll store that start value, pick up the value off the end, go through the middle and multiply it by whichever fuel was in use at the time. And that is, I think, me done.

1:10:28
Kent: All right. Well, give it up for BIJC.

1:10:31
Louis: Yeah, there we go.

1:10:38
Kent: Very cool, and thank you for, was it dbdiagram.io?

1:10:42
Louis: Yeah, honestly, it's one of the most helpful things that we have found in terms of the free tools around.

1:10:47
Kent: I believe it. Travis and Kevin, I hope you're taking notes. I've seen your database schemas, so good tool for you. Just a pro tip. But really a great project. Really great to see behind the scenes how it's all put together. What were your thoughts?

1:11:03
Kevin: Yeah, I think there were a lot of really, really cool things that were built in there. One of them that I wanted to pull out and highlight, as the screens change, all of the math that's behind that and the transforms that are there, it's really, it looks really impressive, and it's also, the way that you implemented it is really simple, too, which is part of the beauty in it. So any screen, as you were showing, any size that that was going to, it's going to be dropped there in the middle. You're able to fly those in from the other sides and fly them out, all of that. Really impressive to me.

1:11:37
Travis: And I'm a fan of ERD diagrams, so it's always good to see the behind-the-scenes, see what's actually the database, and the simplicity of the event table with JSON makes it so powerful, right? Because you can have a Flex Repeater or a table. I don't know exactly what you get, but maybe a Flex Repeater to make it, to show that information there. It's pretty exciting.

1:11:54
Kent: Yeah, I really appreciate you brought up the flexibility of the data model there. I love seeing the JSON, so that people come up with new things to store to their data model after the fact; it's very extensible, right? So a lot of cool stuff. It's going to be a tough decision for you all to decide who's going to be our champion today. Two incredible projects. But with that, I think we can go ahead and start getting ready for our final presentation.

1:12:22
Travis: Wait, Kent. No.

1:12:22
Kevin: Wait, wait, wait, wait, Kent.

1:12:24
Travis: Not too fast. I mean, look, come on.

1:12:27
Kent: Oh boy, what is it now?

1:12:28
Travis: I think that there is a wizard amongst our midst, and that is Inductus the Gateway Maker from the Lands of Hecht.

1:12:41
Kent: Oh my gosh, there's a real wizard up there.

1:12:43
Kevin: Oh, great wizard! Will you please summon our curveball? Magic.

1:13:03
Kent: All right.

1:13:05
Travis: There was no one doing that. It just does it.

1:13:07
Kent: Give it up for Derek Chambers of Flexware, our Ignition wizard. All right. Well, I guess, you know, with Ignition, scalability should be like magic. So I guess this does play in nicely as a metaphor here. But we have a third panel. What does that mean? Travis, tell us a little bit about it.

1:13:30
Travis: Yeah, so if you didn't catch here in the architecture, what we set up for these two teams was simply an Ignition Cloud Edition instance in our AWS account. So each team had their own cloud environment, and we are publishing the data from, as Benson said, from the Epic over MQTT as a UDT through Sparkplug to a chariot broker in the cloud that their Ignition Cloud Edition servers are connected up to. So it's a really simple architecture. We are literally, all that you saw here live was literally being published to the cloud. All the applications they're showing were in the cloud, and the data, the responsive, how fast it was was going all through cellular from these panels. But part of this challenge, is to, for the curveball here, is to show how they're dominating the convenience store market, right? They've got to have more convenience stores being added over time. And so we thought, well, let's bring out another one and see how well they can adapt to a second store being added to their system. 'Cause as we know, with MQTT and Sparkplug, it is auto-magic. Those tags will just show up.

1:14:43
Kent: All right. Well, then I guess the third challenge, the third presentation they're going to get to see for these projects, is we are going to have our teams see the MQTT UDT get published up; well, the UDT published up over MQTT. It's going to be in the broker. Their projects are going to discover it, and we have to see how easily it can commission that new site inside their projects. And it should be easy, right? Easy to roll out new sites. They probably planned for this. They had scalability in mind. We saw the lack of Boston earlier, so we know there's a concept of scalability. So let's see what they can do. Travis and Kevin, for this one, I think it's going to be a little more interactive. We're going to start with DMC. We're going to go ahead and go into their presentation, and we'll have them treat you guys as the customer. So I don't know which one of you is Gru.

1:15:40
Kevin: I guess I was the minion.

1:15:41
Travis: I guess I'll be Gru today; I don't know.

1:15:42
Kent: You're Gru? Kevin the minion. That's my boss, everybody. But you guys are going to come and talk over here. But before we do that, we do want to... Not that page. We do want to come over here and get to know Brandon. So Brandon, the final presenter. That's a lot of trust from your team to have you finish this thing off. Tell us about yourself.

1:16:12
Brandon: Hi. So I'm Brandon. I'm based out of our Chicago office. I've been at DMC just over six years. Fun fact: I'm originally from Tanzania. Grew up, spent most of my life out there. And have lived in Chicago since college. Also a new dad.

1:16:29
Kent: Congratulations.

1:16:24
Brandon: Thank you. And yeah, excited to be here competing.

1:16:31
Kent: Yeah. Awesome. All right. Well, Travis, you want to come and...

1:16:37
Travis: Yeah, let's get this thing started off. So let's bring their screen up here. Because right now, we only have one store, right? And we said that we might be adding new stores. So we're going to go ahead, and right now the transmission on this is turned off. So our team in the back, let's go ahead and turn on transmission to get this data published up to the cloud. They'll give that a few seconds for that to happen. But we'll see how the team will be able to respond, right? What's going to happen here while this is going on?

1:17:08
Brandon: I mean, this is exciting. Your empire is already expanding. Day three. One of the two stores.

1:17:15
Travis: And I have a DeLorean.

1:17:16
Brandon: Wow, that's a nice car.

1:17:17
Travis: This is pretty exciting.

1:17:20
Brandon: But yeah, we know we wanted to make it easy for you to add new stores and expand your empire. Well, it's already expanded. And so the way it works is we're browsing those MQTT tags, and when it detects new UDT instance, it will automatically create those tags and add it to our local configuration and give us a notification that there's a new store that needs to be configured.

1:17:39
Travis: So my empire's expanded now.

1:17:40
Brandon: And your minions are very happy about it. So if we click on this button, it'll take us to the store configuration page, where it will allow us to see all the store, all the new UDTs that have yet been configured. So we wanted to make it easy, so just with a few clicks, you can customize your store and have it ready to use.

1:17:57
Travis: So even somebody as silly or as stupid as Gru here as myself can do it?

1:18:02
Brandon: I think you can do it. So if we click configure store, there's a couple of things that we can change. We can change the location where we get our weather information, which that came pre-configured from the MQTT tags. We can also update the store name. Again, those are preset on the MQTT tags. And lastly, we can decide where we want it to be on the map. So I can pull up this map editor, and I can pick where I want it to be. And so, I don't know, let's just put it like over here.

1:18:27
Travis: Let's put it in the forest, huh?

1:18:29
Amy: Yeah, let's put it right in the forest. So hit confirm location, and then we hit configure store, and it's done.

1:18:36
Travis: Oh my gosh.

1:18:36
Brandon: It's configured. It's all it needs to do. So it's ready to use. So if we go back to the map, we can zoom out, and we can see our new store added. Not yet profitable, but we'll work on that. Start selling some gas. But I wanted to highlight a couple of features that make it easy to use. So as you can imagine, when your empire expands to hundreds of stores around the world, navigating between them could be difficult. But in this drop-down, it allows us to navigate between the stores. And so you can also search for your stores in here. So I can be like Inductive: find the store, navigate to it, and it'll bring it back. And so it allows you to switch between stores very quickly. Also, you can zoom out and still see the status of your stores across the country and how they're performing. So you also can navigate them this way as well.

1:19:19
Brandon: Also, we wanted to give you flexibility to change your stores if you need to move locations, get a new center. So you can, from here, you can update the name and the weather location. You also can reselect a spot on the map where to put it. Again, because, as Nicoli mentioned, all of our views are dynamic using the tag path, so all these views are completely dynamic and reusable. All we have to do is pass in the new tag path, which we do by clicking on the store, and it's already ready to use. So we can set the fuel prices, we can monitor the fuel level, so if we want to add some fuel, schedule a refill, we can do that as well. And then, of course, obviously, we can run the car wash.

1:20:16
Brandon: We also have the light controls, and you can see they're all on, but we can turn them off, and we can have full control of these lights. It's all dynamic. And then the dashboards also, we can select our store, we can see our new store, and we can see how it's been performing over time. And you can see we just bought some fuel, and we haven't been selling gas because we just opened it, but as we sell gas, it'll soon be profitable for us. And so, yeah, some of the best practices that we use to really make it easy to add new stores is passing that tag path as the global identifier for each store makes it easy to like create these screens and make them dynamic. We also created a UUID, a UUID in the database to track all of the transactions to make it easier to filter and sort those transactions. Yeah, so hopefully this app allows you to manage your expanding fleet and be profitable and dominate the convenience store market. Yeah, and I hope you like it. And yeah.

1:21:16
Travis: Thank you so much. Appreciate it.

1:21:26
Kent: Alright. Travis, are you satisfied as the customer?

1:21:29
Travis: I'm pretty satisfied, but I do have plans now for a hundred more, but we got to do it next month.

1:21:32.9
Kent: Perfect. Awesome. Well, Kevin, I'm gonna have you come join me over here as well.

1:21:38
Travis: Yeah, Kevin.

1:21:39
Kent: You're done being a minion. You got to start your own empire over here. Take over the world, right?

1:21:45
Kevin: Hey, Travis. Can I buy a store from you?

1:21:48
Travis: Thanks, man. Here you go.

1:21:49
Kevin: All right. Got it.

1:21:52
Kent: Alright. Well, we are excited to see your project in action, see how it does with the same challenge of commissioning a new store on the fly. But before we jump into that, Amy, we're so excited to have you here representing BIJC, the closer at the end, saving the best for last, is that right?

1:22:13
Amy: I hope so.

1:22:14
Kent: Yes. Well, yeah, please introduce yourself to us.

1:22:18
Amy: Well, I'm Amy. I started at BIJC about a year and nine months ago with no experience. So I think that says something about Chris's hiring practices. But I've learned so much, and I've really learned a lot in that time. And I'm really excited to see in the years to come using Ignition more and more and just becoming more experienced in it. And a fun fact about me is that I'm from Kenya. So with the Olympics, really good at long-distance running, I am not. So I feel like Sheila should be the honorary Kenyan because she's clearly doing better than me at the country sport.

1:23:00
Kent: Great to see in the midst of a competition, a gesture of goodwill, keeping things clean up here for the teams is great. It's that time. We're gonna have you go ahead, and Kevin is going to be your customer. He wants to take over the world, and he is gonna do it with one more convenience store. Let's see it.

1:23:22
Kevin: I am excited. I just bought a store for 20 bucks. Thank you, Travis.

1:23:24
Travis: You're welcome.

1:23:25
Kevin: And I would like to put it on my system. Can you show me how we do that?

1:23:30
Amy: Yes, that will be no problem, fingers crossed. I really don't wanna utter that phrase. It definitely worked earlier, so.

1:23:39
Kevin: We believe you.

1:23:40
Travis: We believe you. Sometimes these things take just a minute to...

1:23:42
Amy: Okay. So.

1:23:43
Kent: Oh, is it there?

1:23:45
Amy: I know. So we have a new store, and it's flashing red to indicate that we have to do something with it. So if I click on here, Folsom is not an existing city that we have in our city table. So we have this configure new city popup where we can put in some initial prices or we can do some promotional levels just to get people interested.

1:24:07
Kevin: Alright. Let's not give it away. That's $2.50.

1:24:12
Amy: What do you want it to be?

1:24:15
Kevin: Let's call it eight bucks, and then when people don't buy...

1:24:16
Amy: Oh. Jesus. Okay.

1:24:19
Travis: But Kevin, you don't even, you have an electric vehicle, man. You don't even have gas.

1:24:24
Kevin: I don't know what it costs.

1:24:27
Amy: Okay. And then we can set the car wash price as well. What do you want that to be?

1:24:32
Kevin: Oh, 10 bucks.

1:24:33
Amy: 10 bucks? Okay.

1:24:34
Kevin: That seems reasonable, right?

1:24:36 Amy: Yeah, I think it is.

1:24:36
Kevin: I don't wash my car either.

1:24:41
Amy: So here, if we were in a new country, 'cause you're looking to expand, we can set for that specific currency, but we'll keep it as US dollars.

1:24:49
Kevin: Beautiful.

1:24:50
Amy: And we'll keep the truck size as 3000 gallons. So when I click this button, it will create a new city in the city table. And then we need to now configure the new store itself. So we have these settings here for the tank car size, and we need to actually put it on the Harris Center. This is where I don't know where I am on the map.

1:25:11
Louis: Just right over there.

1:25:16
Jonathan: Over here.

1:25:19
Kevin: There we are.

1:25:20
Amy: There we are. And now when we click create, we'll see that now it switches to yellow to indicate that this site needs commissioning. So, let's go to our new store. There it is. Well, you're already employee of the month, so well done.

1:25:46
Amy: And let's see if anyone's managed to make the banned list in that short space of time.

1:25:53
Kent: How did you know?

1:25:55
Amy: I think it's actually actually a blanket country ban. Maybe a global ban. I think that's actually more of an achievement, Kent, than a failure. So well done.

1:26:06
Amy: So here you can see, we can operate all the same things that we could on the other one. Simulate the door opening. We can also... Oh, where's my mouse? There it is. You go to the fuel station, we'll see those new updated prices there. We also have the city pop up here so you can edit that in real time. You might have had a change of heart and decided to charge cheaper prices if you want. So you could set that down, and that will update on the screen shortly. There you go. And now we are happy with the prices, and we're happy with the store. We can go over here, and we can take the store out of commissioning and set it as active. That will also change its status on the map. So now it's green. Oh, sorry. And now we can operate on the car wash. Let me click on it on the map again. I'll go that way. Just to prove you to you that it really does work.

1:27:15
Kevin: Yeah, and I get my little animation there too.

1:27:17
Amy: Yes.

1:27:18
Kevin: That's my favorite part.

1:27:22
Amy: So yeah, that is our new store commissioned and up and running. I will like to say that I'm definitely not under duress and that, and that Kevin has informed us that he does not know where my family lives. So please don't feel bad about not voting for us because I will definitely be here for the next ICC.

1:28:00
Kent: Awesome. Well, incredible job to both teams. What a Build-A-Thon. Only thing that's left now is for you to decide which project you like better. And so at this time, we do invite you to pull out your phones. Hopefully you haven't been on your phones the whole time; you're paying attention up here. Come on, stay with me. But go ahead, pull out your phones. You're gonna go once again to the IA Events app, and you're gonna go into this event. You're gonna go ahead and go to the agenda at the bottom. You're gonna go to today, the 19th. And you're gonna scroll until you see the Build-A-Thon. You're gonna click on the Build-A-Thon, you're gonna scroll to the bottom, you're going to see the polls, and you should have a poll there that you can click on to vote for your favorite team.

1:28:47
Kent: Alright. So yeah, I think at that point, I do wanna say these panels by Opto 22 truly are incredible. And as was alluded to earlier, after this session, we will be taking the panels upstairs. Give us a little bit of time to get them up there. But we will be plugging them setting up so that you can come and check out the panels, turn on a car wash, and see all the great work that Opto 22 has done. Alright. Yeah, give it up for Opto, right?

1:29:24
Travis: So, yeah.

1:29:25
Kevin: Alright. Well, I think as they're getting their final votes in here, we have one thing. Go ahead and take a couple of minutes to vote. But we have something that has to do with music and it has to do with the video.

1:29:37
Kent: I think you're right, Kevin. We can't have a Build-A-Thon without...

1:29:40
Kevin: A music video.

1:29:41
Kent: A music video. All right. Enjoy.

1:30:14
Kent: 2018, it all began. I watched from the side, Travis and Kevin; the pioneers filled me with pride. Perspective was the challenge. A new dawn in our side. Travis took the crown that year. His brilliance shining bright. The next year brought a re-match, the Ignition Exchange, in play. Kevin's historical playback stole the show that day. I stood there in the shadows, admiring their might, wondering if I would ever step into the light. From Travis's first victory to Kevin's shining win, their rivalry and friendship is where it begins. Man. The Build-A-Thon rocks! The Build-A-Thon rocks! The Build-A-Thon rocks! Yes, it does! The Build-A-Thon rocks! The Build-A-Thon rocks! The Build-A-Thon rocks! The Build-A-Thon rocks! Yes, it does! The Build-A-Thon rocks!

1:31:52
Kent: Each year I see the teams, Vertech, Flexware, and more. Roeslein, DMC, Corso, and Design Group, they all soared. Opto 22's creations, a spectacle to behold mixing tanks and Galton boards, stories to be told. I feel the weight of history, the legacy they've made. Travis and Kevin, my heroes, their shadows never fade. But in their light I find my strength to host and to inspire; keep the spirit of the Build-A-Thon burning like a fire. 'Cause the Build-A-Thon rocks! The Build-A-Thon rocks! The Build-A-Thon rocks! Yes, it does! The Build-A-Thon rocks! The Build-A-Thon rocks! The Build-A-Thon rocks! The Build-A-Thon rocks! Yes, it does; the Build-A-Thon rocks!

1:33:02
Kevin: The Build-A-Thon's a wonder, a testament to skill. We gather here to innovate, with passion and with will. But Kent, my friend, you seem so down; you're down for plain to see. Just take my hand 'cause you and I, and us, we all agree. The Build-A-Thon rocks! Yes, it does! The Build-A-Thon rocks! Every day! The Build-A-Thon rocks! Yes, it does! The Build-A-Thon rocks! Amazing socks songs! The Build-A-Thon rocks! Like the Rednecks! The Build-A-Thon rocks! Golden marble! The Build-A-Thon rocks! Yes, it does! The Build-A-Thon rocks! The Build-A-Thon rocks! Like dinosaurs! The Build-A-Thon rocks! Like birds! The Build-A-Thon rocks! Yes, it does! The Build-A-Thon rocks! Pop rocks! The Build-A-Thon rocks! Classic rocks! The Build-A-Thon rocks! Yeah rocks! The Build-A-Thon rocks! Yes, it does! The Build-A-Thon rocks! Yes, it does! The Build-A-Thon.

1:34:23
Kent: Magic.

1:34:30
Travis: Let's all give it up for the best MC, master of ceremonies, Kent Melville, everybody.

1:34:44
Kent: I love working for Inductive Automation, where we don't take ourselves too seriously, and love being part of the IA Department of Funk. Thank you so much for joining us last night. Thanks for indulging this music video. We love you guys.

1:35:03.7
Kent: I think it's that time. Who wants to know who the winner of the Build-A-Thon is this year? Yeah? Yeah? Alright. Well, we are closing polling. Polling is done. At this point, we are going to go ahead and reveal the winner, and we're gonna put it up on the screen. So I give you this year's Build-A-Thon Champion, DMC; look at that!

1:35:30.2
Kent: DMC, go ahead and come on up here. It was close. Congratulations to both teams. Thank you for participating, seeing so many votes. As is the tradition, when you win the Build-A-Thon, you get a coveted orange jacket. Something that the music video made very clear that I have never done, so I have a green jacket. But to provide the orange jackets, we are going to invite on stage last year's Build-A-Thon winners from Barry-Wehmiller Design Group. Give it up for Design Group, everybody.

1:36:12.1
Kent: Alright. You may go ahead and present the jackets. And do they fit this year? Yes. Look at that. We did something right, folks. Alright, I give you your new champions.

1:36:32
Kent: Alright. Well, these teams will be around for the rest of the day. Please go congratulate them, tell them what you loved about their projects. Go and ask for tips about your next project. It is great to see the best of the best here on this stage, and we look forward to doing it again for you in the future. Also, we are very excited to do this in the morning of the last day so that you can have a chance to play around with the panels. But if the Build-A-Thon is not closing out the conference, what is? Well, we have a closing keynote for you later today. I talked about this last night, but there will be a special announcement in that session. We do hope you stick around, but for now, we just wanna say thank you and have a great day.

Wistia ID
bfbh19c7gw
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Video Duration
5981
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Speakers

Kent Melville

Director of Sales Engineering

Inductive Automation

Travis Cox

Chief Technology Evangelist

Inductive Automation

Kevin McClusky

Chief Technology Architect & VP of Sales

Inductive Automation

ICC Year
2024.00
icc | 2024 Keynote

Technical Keynote: What's New in Ignition 8.3

Traditionally, we've always held the Technical Keynote or Development Panel on Day Three of the conference, but this year, we've got something big to discuss, so we've moved it up to Day One of our conference content schedule. It's no secret that we've been working on the newest version of Ignition for several years now, and now we're finally able to dive deep into what's coming in Ignition 8.3 and how its powerful new features can lead users to their next big breakthrough idea!

69 min video

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icc | 2024 Keynote

Main Keynote: Exploring the Impact of the Ignition Community

The global community of Ignition users includes large multinational enterprises, government and professional organizations, small companies, and individuals. While each uses the software differently, they all use Ignition to harness the power of automation to accomplish their own mission of making something better. In this keynote, we'll explore how Inductive Automation is supporting the efforts of the Ignition Community and the incredible impact their work has on the future and improving people's lives on a regional and local level.

56 min video

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icc | 2023 Build-a-Thon

Build-A-Thon

The conference is guaranteed to go out with a bang as the Build-a-Thon closes out ICC once again. Join us for the conclusion of the ultimate Ignition challenge, where the final two teams compete for the glory of developing the most elevated Ignition solutions and being crowned Build-a-Thon champions. Who will wear the orange winner’s blazer after the votes are all counted? There’s only one way to find out, so stick around to catch the competitive spirit and enjoy an unforgettable music performance from IA’s Department of Funk that you’ll be humming for weeks!

76 min video

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icc | 2023 IA Session

Technical Keynote

Developing industry-defining software is no easy task, but someone has to do it. Join our Development team as they highlight recent improvements and upgrades, current developments, and a behind-the-scenes peek at the future of Ignition before answering questions directly from the Ignition community.

60 min video

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icc | 2023 Community Session

From LinkedIn Connections to Community Leaders: The Automation Ladies Experience

What happens when two passionate ladies in industrial automation meet on LinkedIn and decide to create a podcast? Magic. And growth, lots of growth. Dive into the journey of the Automation Ladies podcast and how it has become an engine for both business growth and network expansion. Nikki and Ali will unpack how amplifying your voice online can have real-world business benefits. If you want to grow your customer base, attract top-tier suppliers, or strengthen your community, this talk should have some actionable takeaways on the power of creating an authentic personal brand by sharing your journey with the world.

46 min video

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icc | 2023 IA Session

An Overview of Ignition’s MongoDB Connector Module

Earlier this year, we introduced a connector module that allows an Ignition Gateway to integrate with MongoDB. This session provides an overview of MongoDB, outlines the connector module's capabilities, and demonstrates how you can most effectively leverage it to elevate the functionality of your existing deployments.

42 min video

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icc | 2023 Community Session

Hitting a Home Run with Ignition

Ignition is not limited to industrial applications alone; its powerful features extend to use cases of all kinds. From its intuitive design features to its robust scripting capabilities, you can harness the full potential of its flexible architecture and rich tool-set to create innovative solutions in non-industrial automation development. Witness this potential firsthand through a baseball scoring and statistics app developed entirely in Perspective, while providing examples of how tags, persistence, scripting, and views can be utilized in a non-industrial setting. Our goal is to inspire others to elevate their lives and hobbies in new creative ways with Ignition.

45 min video

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icc | 2023 Community Session

The OG Perspective: 10+ Years of Ignition Wisdom and Beyond

In this session, we'll explore more than a decade of experience with Ignition, sharing valuable insights as a long-time member of the Ignition community. We'll take a practical look at how Ignition has evolved and its role in modern manufacturing, including topics like MES, OEE, AI, and more. It's an opportunity to gain practical knowledge and understand the journey from the early days to today's automation landscape.

42 min video

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icc | 2023 Community Session

Rising to the Challenge - Adventures in System Conversion

The folks at Flexware are no strangers to a challenge. When the opportunity to convert a large system over to Ignition arose, they took it head on. Join them in this session where they'll talk about the project and share their lessons learned, talk about custom tools, and describe their thought process.

41 min video

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icc | 2023 IA Session

Learning Ignition Fundamentals

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.

45 min video

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icc | 2023 Community Session

Integrator Panel

Which new innovations will prove vital for future success and which flash-in-the-pan trends are destined to be forgotten by ICC 2024? During this panel discussion, some of the Ignition community's most successful integration professionals share how they are responding to emerging technologies and techniques that are driving the evolution of the automation landscape.

44 min video

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icc | 2023 Community Session

Tyson’s Smart Factory Journey

This session provides an overview of how Tyson has standardized operations with Ignition as a SCADA platform, highlighting and detailing how consistent data and dashboards allow for faster implementations. The talk will also include best practices that Tyson has developed, and will identify some of the key integrations that have helped simplify and streamline data collection processes.

28 min video

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icc | 2023 Community Session

Don’t Get Lost in the Cloud: Tips & Tricks for Successful Ignition Deployment and Management

With the release of Cloud Edition, it's never been easier to get Ignition running in the cloud. But are you ready for it? From security concerns to misconfigurations, there are plenty of pitfalls to stumble upon when managing applications in the cloud. But fear not, as help is on the way. Join the experts from 4IR in this session where they'll provide helpful tips and tricks for deploying and managing Ignition in the cloud.

45 min video

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icc | 2023 Community Session

Elevate Your OT Data Securely to the Cloud

Ignition Cloud Edition! Awesome! But wait… How can I possibly connect my PLCs or I/O systems to the cloud? Won’t that jeopardize them? And require heavy IT involvement? What’s the payoff? In this session, we’ll discuss how to use Ignition Edge and Ignition Cloud Edition together to quickly create scalable, high-performance, cybersecure architectures for democratizing your OT system’s data. Whether in brownfield or greenfield environments, you’ll unlock the power of edge-to-cloud hybrid architectures that are cost-effective, easy to manage, cybersecure, and deliver more value to your organization.

45 min video

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icc | 2023 IA Session

We Love Ignition. But Can it REALLY Scale?

Can it REALLY scale? This is a question we have received for the last 10 years. Delve into the realm of enterprise Ignition rollouts with industry insights from the lens of an enterprise integrator. Uncover the strategies and best practices that accelerate the implementation and ensure the long-term sustainability of Ignition. Don’t just believe us – hear it firsthand from a guest appearance with one of our enterprise end users.

42 min video

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icc | 2023 IA Session

Deployment Patterns for Ignition on Kubernetes

Kevin Collins returns to ICC for a demonstration of how to harness the combined power of Ignition and Kubernetes. This session offers an in-depth look at methods for effectively automating deployment, scaling, and managing containerized Ignition applications.

59 min video

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icc | 2023 Community Session

Separating Design From Development - Using Design Tools with Ignition

Building screens in Ignition is a breeze, but did you know you can design screens even faster by mocking them up using a design tool? Join us for this session as we talk about the benefits of moving the design process outside of a development platform. We'll cover topics such as design vs. development, UI vs. UX, benefits of using design tools, and an introduction to the design tool Figma.

43 min video

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icc | 2023 IA Session

Ignition Exchange Resource Showcase

Since the Ignition Exchange’s introduction in 2019, members of the Ignition community have contributed hundreds of resources ranging from pre-built templates, tools, and scripts to Ignition-powered retro arcade games — all available for free. Discover the full potential of the Ignition Exchange as we highlight some of its most valuable assets, including a handpicked sampling of the top Exchange resources developed by IA engineers.

41 min video

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icc | 2023 IA Session

Ignition Diagnostics and Troubleshooting Basics

Ignition offers numerous built-in tools for gathering diagnostic information about the health of your system. This session offers an overview of these tools and explains how our Support Division leverages this information during the troubleshooting process. By the end of this session, fixing problems will feel like shooting code in a barrel.

46 min video

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icc | 2023 IA Session

Introduction to Automated Testing of Perspective Projects

Learn the most effective ways for leveraging automated testing to safeguard your development-to-production process. This session will start by outlining how the core tenets of testing apply to automated testing, leading directly into best practices for verifying that your Perspective project development is production-ready.

38 min video

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icc | 2023 Panel

Industry Panel: ICC 2023

61 min video

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icc | 2023 Community Session

I4.0 Accelerator for Driving Edge to Cloud Business Outcomes

Come and learn with Cirrus Link and Snowflake what your data has to say. Snowflake, Inductive Automation & Cirrus Link have partnered to provide Data Cloud Solutions. With Ignition UDTs, MQTT, and Sparkplug, discover how easy it is to leverage Snowflake’s platform to gain derived data insights immediately through native AI tooling. Learn about the impact of the recent partnership of NVIDIA and Snowflake. See how this disrupting technology, in conjunction with Ignition, will elevate and simplify your journey to data insights.

49 min video

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