Vision Module: See and Control Your Process in Real Time

Free your operators from manually tracking process data on whiteboards and clipboards by creating dynamic, beautiful, real-time dashboards and control screens with the Ignition Vision Module. Use the Vision Module to quickly build any type of visualization for your industrial organization: HMI, historical trending, and alarming screens, plus charts, graphs, and much more.

Transcript:

00:06
Travis Cox: The Vision Module allows you to design and deploy industrial applications to PCs and industrial displays, whether on the plant floor or in your office. You can use the Vision Module to quickly build any type of visualization: HMI for real-time status control, historical trending, alarming, plus charts, graphs, and much more. Vision has been around since the beginning of Ignition as an extensive use in just about every industry. The Vision Module adds the ability to create windows, templates, and client events to Ignition, ultimately providing the ability to build and launch any application as a client. The Vision Module is designed for desktops, and it requires a Windows, Linux, or Mac OS operating system to run. If you're looking to view the application on a phone or tablet, refer to the Perspective Module for Ignition that is designed for pure web visualization. Vision supports high-resolution displays and setups with multiple monitors, such as in a control room with many TV displays on the wall.

01:00
Travis Cox: Vision can run a kiosk mode that is full screen with no access to the operating system for HMIs on the plant floor. You can instantly deploy changes to runtimes without having to relaunch or touch each client station. Vision clients are web-launched by using the Vision native client launcher, that can easily be downloaded from your Ignition server. You can create desktop shortcuts to launch the application quickly, and even put the shortcut in your OS startup to have it launch automatically on reboot. The module can interface with just about every part of Ignition, from accessing tags to performing SQL queries and databases, interfacing with Rest APIs, and leveraging Ignition's extensive scripting functions. Vision Windows are the basic building blocks for all of your applications. There are three types of windows. Main windows that is set to start maximizing and takes up all the available space in the client.

01:46
Travis Cox: They're perfect for overview screens. Popup windows that appear when the user performs action, perfect for detailed popups of your process. Dock windows are set to a static location on the screen and often holds navigation trees or status information that needs to remain on the screen at all times. A large number of navigation options exist in the Vision Module. You can decide which windows open on startup or even specify custom windows depending on who is logged in. From there, you can decide how a user navigates. Whether you use navigation trees, buttons, tabs, or menu bars, you are in control of the user experience, especially what the user has access to. The Vision Module supports industry-leading encryption protocols and supports modern web-based authentication strategies such as federated identity, multi-factor authentication, and single sign-on, along with classic authentication strategies for built-in authentication in Ignition or Active Directory.

02:39
Travis Cox: Once a user logs in, they are assigned roles and security levels that can dictate what the user has access to in Vision applications. For example, it is easy to lock down rights to PLC tags, administration screens, and much more. Vision gives you many ways to bring your process to life with powerful graphics and animation tools. You can import any SVG file, choose from nearly 4,000 ready-made images available in the Symbol Factory Module, or you can draw you r own vector graphics. You can also easily make the graphics come to life through animations. Vision components are the building blocks for your project. The Vision Module has a variety of built-in components, such as displays, buttons, charts, and other elements that display information. Each component has multiple properties that control its appearance, behavior, and data. Vision provides powerful binding functions to bring displays to life. A binding is a mechanism that allows a property on a component to change based on a change to a value elsewhere in Ignition.

03:33
Travis Cox: For example, with binding, the liquid level displayed in a tank graphic can be bound to the tag representing the liquid level in an actual tank. Vision supports five types of bindings: properties to link to other properties on the screen, tags to directly or indirectly link to tags in Ignition, expressions to link to calculations using Ignition's powerful expression language, databases to link to SQL queries, Tag Historian to link to data from Ignition's Tag Historian Module, and functions to link to predefined functions such as getting alarm status and much more. Templates are a simple but very powerful feature in Ignition that you can use with Vision windows. The power comes from the ability to modify only the template in one location while affecting all of the instances used throughout the project. HMI and SCADA systems typically have a lot of repetition in their screens. You might use a group of the same components over and over again within your project.

04:27
Travis Cox: The data driving each set of graphics is different, but the graphics themselves are copies of each other. You can make a single template and use instances of the template over and over again, effectively leveraging object-oriented design. Achieve advanced functionality in Vision using the built-in Python scripting language. The Python scripting language is well supported, powerful, and easy to learn and read, so your projects are easy to maintain. With scripting, you can respond to an event handler such as a button click, customize components through extension functions, perform client startups, shut down, timer, and keystroke scripts, send messages, and a lot more. Try out the Vision Module by downloading the free trial of Ignition today.