How to Easily Build SCADA & HMI HTML5 Web Applications

Speakers

Don Pearson

Cheif Strategy Officer

Inductive Automation

Kevin McClusky

Co-Director of Sales Engineering

Inductive Automation

Sam Burns

Control Systems Engineer

ESM Australia

Tysan Greaves

Control Systems Engineer

ESM Australia

(Note: The webinar recording above contains a demo with an inactive QR code. However, you can view an online demo of the Perspective Module at: demo.ia.io) 

The new Ignition Perspective Module is a game-changing visualization tool that enables you to easily design HTML5 SCADA screens for mobile, desktop, and more. This special webinar will show you how easy it is to get started using Ignition Perspective so you can get the most out of it.

Join Inductive Automation’s product experts and special guests for a tour of the features and possibilities of our latest module. Whether you’re working on an HMI, SCADA, IIoT, or another type of industrial application, see how Ignition Perspective can bring the power of the web and mobile computing into your projects as never before. 

Learn more about:

• Going from downloading the software to designing a real project in a few minutes 
• Utilizing Perspective’s browser-based design environment 
• Building with mobile-responsive design elements
• Using CSS to style your project
• Leveraging mobile-device sensor data
• Deploying project updates to users near-instantaneously
• And more!

Webinar Transcript

00:00
Don Pearson: Good morning everyone and welcome to today's webinar, "How to easily build SCADA and HMI HTML5 web applications, designing and deploying industrial applications with Ignition perspective". My name is Don Pearson, I will serve as the moderator for today's webinar. Thank you for joining us. In just a couple of minutes I'll introduce our speakers. Just to glance at today's agenda we're gonna basically briefly... I will briefly introduce Inductive Automation, Ignition and our speakers. Then we'll learn about HTML5 CSS3 and Ignition perspective. Then we'll see an extended demo of the Ignition perspective module, we'll take a look at a real world application that leverages the module. And we'll end as we always do with some Q&As. So who is Inductive Automation? Well, a little background on us. We've been in business since 2003. Our Ignition software platform has been adopted by thousands of industrial organizations all over the world. They're using it for HMI, SCADA, MES, and IoT Solutions. It's actually being used now by 48% of Fortune 100 and I think about 29% of Fortune 500 are deploying Ignition within their organizations. We have over 2200 integrators who joined our integrator program, doing business in over 100 countries. And our most recent release is the upgraded Ignition 8 platform, which supports expanded architectures, enhanced security, and as you'll see, first-class mobile solutions.

01:28
DP: So for more information, you can certainly go to our website, go to the "About section" on the website, and you get a better understanding of the company and our background. Just a quick snapshot on Ignition. It truly is unique. It's the world's first universal industrial application platform. It provides an integrated development environment for those HMI, SCADA, MES, and IoT solutions. A couple of bullet points on it, you see on the screen here. It has an unlimited licensing model, so with one server license you got unlimited tags, clients, connection, device connections, consumer and designers. It's cross-platform in its compatibility, IT standard technologies... The basis of it, a scalable server-client architecture. It's web-based, web managed, web launched designer and clients, and it features a modular architecture. So basically with modular configurability you just buy whatever it is you need, and you add on when you need to add on, but you don't buy what you don't need until you need it. Rapid development and deployment tools. So these are some of the features of Ignition. As I said you can certainly go to the website and there's a lot of information on it if you're not familiar with Ignition. Now to today's topic. I am joined today by Kevin McClusky. Kevin is co-director of sales engineering here at Inductive Automation. He's been here a long time. Right Kevin? [chuckle] A pretty long time.

02:54
Kevin McClusky: That's right.

02:55
DP: Time passes. He'll take us for a deep dive into the Ignition perspective module. He's been here since 2011. He's also got a lot of expert experience in industrial automation, and software integration. So with that, give your own introduction of yourself, Kevin.

03:08
KM: Sure, Don. Good to be here everyone. So, my name is Kevin McClusky as Don mentioned. I've been with the company for about 10 years, and I've worked with a lot of customers. I've worked with a lot of folks who are both in integration organizations and our users of the software, who've done projects, spanning from anywhere from water treatment to nuclear radiation detection systems to baggage handling, to IoT solutions to enterprise deployments. It's good to be here with you guys today.

03:38
DP: Thank you so much, Kevin. Thanks for being here. And we have two guests, who I believe were up pretty early because they're from Australia, from ESM Australia. Sam Burns and Tysan Greaves from ESM. ESM Australia is an Ignition premier integrator based in Brisbane, Australia. They have completed successful Ignition installations in many industries, including food and beverage, healthcare, and manufacturing. So later on on the webinar after Kevin does his demo you're gonna get a chance to hear from Sam and Tysan. They're gonna be showing us a pretty impressive solution that they built, leveraging Ignition 8, and the Ignition perspective module. So Sam and Tysan, I really appreciate you guys joining us. I appreciate you getting up so early. I'm going to assume you're awake, 'cause I'm going to ask you to introduce yourselves here for a second and then, we'll turn it back over to Kevin. So Sam, how about you first, a little bit of introduction to yourself and your background.

04:32
Sam Burns: Sure. Yeah, thanks. So good morning everyone. Yeah, as it says my name there is Sam Burns. I'm a control systems engineer with ESM Australia. I've been with ESM for about two years. And during that time I've had the opportunity to work on about half a dozen different Ignition SCADA products.

04:53
DP: That's great, Sam. Thanks, and I do appreciate your time for sure. How about you, Tysan? Introduce yourself.

04:57
Tysan Greaves: My name is Tysan Greaves. I'm also a control systems engineer with ESM Australia, and I've been with ESM for about a year now and worked on about four projects with the company.

05:09
DP: Great, thanks... Thanks, Sam and Tysan. Kevin, I am going to turn it over to you.

05:15
KM: All right, I appreciate it, Don. So I have the pleasure today of showing you a bit about how the new Ignition perspective module works. Hyper Text Markup Language, HTML, is the structure of standard websites. CSS is the styling of standard websites. And what we've done with our latest released software is, we have taken these concepts, we've created a visualization system that takes advantage of these. And it creates something that you can pull up, and you can see on your phones, you can see inside your web browsers, and you can interact with anywhere inside the world. We always had visualization that was accessible around the world, but this makes it even more accessible because it can run directly inside a web browser. And as you'll see, you can also do things with native device integration. Things like a GPS and some other things. If we talk just a little bit more about HTML and CSS... HTML5, specifically, is the latest revision of HTML. It has rich markup, style, and interactivity, it supports multimedia on mobile devices, has a great compatibility between browsers, and doesn't require proprietary plugins, and APIs.

06:33
KM: CSS3 is the current, and the best version of CSS, with faster speed support for responsive design, and support for great compatibility, animations, and effects, amongst other things. HTML and CSS3 both play an important part in the new Ignition Perspective Module, as I just mentioned. So we released this in April. Perspective is a powerful visualization tool that makes it easy to build and deploy flexible screens that fit to any device. It has a pre-configured container type... A variety of them, actually, that expand and collapse for mobile, tablet, desktop screens. And it also runs on any current web browser on any major operating system. Perspective uses HTML5 and CSS3 for the UI layer. With HTML and CSS, it displays screens gracefully on different sizes of devices, and you'll see that in a few minutes here. Perspective also has CSS3 settings, that make it easier to configure themes and styles, so it's easier to change your text, color, or position, border, or layout, anything inside your application, and make your style consistent across your project. CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets, which means you can apply that style in one place and then it will cascade to everything inside that element. So you can apply it to a whole page, for example.

07:57
KM: Perspective also has many other features. It has a native application for both iPhone and Android devices that lets you leverage a mobile device's camera, GPS, and sensor data. There's also a feature called Transforms that improves data bindings, by letting you change the input value into different output values without any intermediary steps. If you've already used Ignition, or any other SCADA system for that point, you'll really appreciate that feature. Today, we're mainly going to focus on using Perspective to build HMI, SCADA, and IoT web applications, where it utilizes HTML and CSS behind the scenes. And we'll explore those features of it too. After I go through a bit of a demonstration, we're also going to be able to take a look at some screenshots and have a conversation around a full application that's been built-out. So I'm going to show you the design environment, the design tools, and we might even let you follow along here.

09:00
KM: So just to frame this. This is a standard Ignition architecture. If you have the Ignition server sitting in the middle, this is where Ignition might be installed. Ignition will be connected to different devices. Ignition will be connected to databases, or a single database, and then you'll have multiple different clients that might be connected to it. And you see mobile devices down there on the bottom, you see laptops, you see desktops, touch panels. All of those can run Perspective inside a web browser, or you could have the Vision client, which is a full rich desktop client. As we're talking about today, we're focused on Perspective, so I'm going to show you that. I'll jump over here. And what I've done right before this meeting, I've come in and I've installed Ignition. Right on our Inductive Automation website you can go and you can download it yourself. And I'd encourage anyone to do this who wants to. And you click the Download Ignition button right there, it gives you Ignition, running on your local system. It'll give you a two-hour trial, and you can reset that as many times as you want. So all I did was I went in here, ran this installer, did just a little bit of configuration, and we're up and running. So it says I'm already installed. I won't run through that installer again, but it literally takes about two minutes to get up and running, and install.

10:22
KM: Now that I am installed right there, I'll come back over to the web pages and go over to the Ignition gateway web page, that's sitting right here. This is the web page that is giving me just basic information about Ignition. You can see right here that I've got my status page. It's going to show me how it's running. I don't really have anything that's happening inside Ignition right now, so this is very, very simple. The first thing I'm going to do is connect up to a database. And so I'll create a new database connection. I have PostgreSQL installed on my local system here, but this could be any database that you want. Or as mentioned earlier, this could be multiple different databases. And if you give me a second to make sure I type this right. There we go. So that's a connection up to the database, and then I'll connect up to a device as well. Since I'm doing this in a way that's accessible to everyone, I could connect to a PLC that's on my local system. So I could do a MicroLogix that happens to be local to me, or I could run through... Do... We've got a variety of drivers.

11:32
KM: I'm going to connect up to... One of the things that we know has really good tags for demonstration, which is one of our demonstration simulators that we have behind the scenes. So I have that set up right here. And if we take a look at status, we'll see the device is connected, the database is connected, and we're good to go. I'm gonna click, Get Designer in the upper right and download this designer launcher. And I'm really taking you from absolute zero, fresh, for all of this, because I want to give you a sense of... If you want to play with this later, if you want to understand how this works, if you want to explore, please feel free. You don't have to sign a big contract with us, you don't have to go through and do a variety of things there. And so I installed the designer launcher. It's already installed now, because it was that quick. And then I'm going to launch my local project here. So this is launching up, and this is going to launch the designer. Now that I've got the designer going here, I'll minimize everything else. This is a stand-alone application for designing. You've probably heard us mention that Ignition is the unlimited platform, so you can have as many designers as you want running simultaneously. You could have two or three or five or 20 people designing at the same time.

12:54
KM: I'm coming in here and I'm going to pick some basic settings for all of this. And so I've got that demo project, the default database, and I'm picking this project template that says menu NAV template, which is really nice. You can start from a completely blank project. You control really every pixel on the screen. But this is going to give us a pre-built menu along the left-hand side and a few other nice things. Now that I have this set up, I'm going to come right in here, go over to my homepage, hit my save button, and launch this up inside a session. And so I can see that this is running inside a web browser at this point. And I'll go to the regular zoom level at this and see, "Welcome to perspective." If I wanna see how this looks inside a mobile device, this is a mobile responsive application. So I'm gonna jump over here and we can see in a variety of different mobile device form factors, this is what it's going to look like. I'll come over and I'll change this very quickly. So instead of saying "Welcome to Perspective," I'll say, "Welcome to the webinar." Hit okay. And I'll hit save right here. And you'll see you right here inside this demo, I've gone through and by the time I clicked over to this and switched back to the web browser, it immediately showed that that change is through.

14:27
KM: Now, I'm gonna do something that's really fun here, which is audience participation. So go ahead and pull out your mobile device. Whether that's in your phone or sitting next to you on the desk, just go ahead and grab it. Pull it out. And I am going to give you a code that you can scan here in order to take a look at some of the stuff that I'm doing. So this is a QR code. If you have an Apple device, just go to your camera app, point at it, it'll pop up something in the top. If you have an Android device, pull up a QR code reader application. You probably have one installed. If you've never installed one before, you could install one fresh and I'll circle back and show this again in a little bit, just in case you need to do that. But in my experience, almost everyone has a QR code scanner already. So I think that 95% of you will be able to scan this right away. Take a look. And once you have scanned that and once you pop that up, and click through, you should see the message right there. That's the welcome to the webinar message.

15:36
KM: Just to verify, if anyone wants to throw in questions, to let me know that that's showing up for you as well, that would be great. We have this set up and we've tested it inside our own network, and I just wanna make sure if I'm talking about this, that you're able to follow along. Okay, excellent. Everybody is saying it's working and I've got 20, 30, 40 responses. Almost 50 responses. Okay, alright, great. So we're good on that front. Cool. So let me hop back over here. So this is relatively simple. It just says, "Welcome to the webinar." I'm gonna pop right over here and come in and browse my OPC server. This is the demo project that I connected to. The demo device that I connected to here. And you can see there are a variety of different things in here. So I'll pull on a few different tags. Maybe I'll pull in my compressor tags right here. And inside my compressor tags, I have some live values that are coming through. I'll pull in these and set these guys up for... Well, the first thing I'll do actually is just pull them out onto the screen so you can see them right away.

16:50
KM: So I'll do an LED display for this guy. This is an amps... Maybe I have a... Just a standard little label below that guy. I could use this guy as a tank graphic right there. And I'm gonna hit, save. I don't like this one because it's not changing. Well, it's not changing very fast. I'll adjust it. Switch it out to something that's changing. I'm gonna hit save there again. And as you can see, this is starting to pop back up. Somebody already requested seeing the QR code again. So I'm happy to do that. Let me switch back over to that. And this QR code is right there. So that should hopefully be big enough for you to scan at this point, and you can pull that up. Alright, so I'll pop right back over here, and inside this project. I'll come over and... You should see those values updating on the screen. I'm going to take these and store some history for all of this. I'll come and hit edit tag, here and... Well actually, I'll pull on a few new tags. And these new tags that I'm pulling in are going to be... Maybe I'll do compressor two here in this case. So I'll grab these, demo compressor two, and I will set up values on a lot of these. So I'm hitting edit tags. I'll just edit all of them and store a lot of history here. And that will give me the ability to quickly take a look at all of this and charts and graphs. Hit, save, right there.

18:38
KM: That should start pulling some things through. So, I'm gonna jump right back over here. And inside this compressor two, I've set this up where I have history that's stored on these guys now. I'm gonna come over to a chart, open up the series, go to data here and grab the data. So I will go in and I'm gonna do the tag history binding, swing in with this, grab the tags that I have connected here, and I have line voltage, I know that I have my motor ramps, I have my percent loaded, at all our values that are coming through here. Just set this up for the last minute and set it up to polling at a one-second rate here. Hit okay, we can see that coming through live. And if I go over to my alarm set up here, I'll come in, grab a variety of these, edit these, come over to my storage providers, and right above that, I have alarms, so I can configure alarms for all of these. I'll set up an alarm in bulk at this point. So I'll set this also, it's above a certain setpoint. Maybe if these go above 50, then I'm in alarm condition.

19:47
KM: So I hit okay, hit commit right there, hitting all right and hit the save button. And you can see right over here in alarms. These alarms have now just come through on my side, and if I come through to a display on this side, you get that alarm panel, it has information about the alarms that I can go back and forth to you, or if I show this in a standard responsive type of view or essentially a web view here, you can see what this would look like inside a standard web page. We did have a question coming through that says, "Are you saying that the Ignition software serves as a SCADA system?" The answer to that is "Yes, absolutely." So we have... Ignition is a SCADA platform, it's an HMI SCADA, MES, and IIoT platform. And we have... I believe the majority of our customers are using it as a SCADA platform and started to use it as an IIoT platform as well.

20:45
KM: Alright, so now that I've set this up and given us some basic visualization here, I'm going to show you one more thing. So I'm going to pop in a brand new project. I'll save my current project, that's fine. And inside this new project, I will call this dashboard. What we did for existing Ignition users who might have some screens that are already built out, but those screens are built in the visualization system before Perspective, we created a new project here that makes it easier to get started with Perspective. For anyone who's never done this before, you might be interested in this as well. I'm just calling this dashboard. You're gonna give it a database here and tell it that I wanna go to the Perspective dashboard project template. Create a new project right here. And this project template has a variety of different things that are built-in, different visualizations, different configurations, where I'm simply going to save this off and launch this session. So I will log in. This has a username-password authentication, which we have through all of Ignition, our database tables don't exist yet. But basically, this is a dashboarding tool that allows you to very easily come in and create these dashboards.

22:09
KM: I'll pop over and actually show you a couple of things inside here in terms of some layouts. Some folks were asking about, how do you do different types of things inside here, especially existing Ignition customers have asked, things like, are the template repeater or that type of thing available? Answer is absolutely yes. And if you take a look at these elements that we've built out for each one of these, they're not configured to anything, so it's gonna have overlays, but this gives you a basic idea of different types of components that are available inside Ignition, different types of components that are available inside this demo project. And if I come right back over here, I'm going to open this demo project again and I'll show you a quick view of the responsive design tools that you can have here. So inside here, this is the project that I had open earlier. Come right in here to that main page that we were all looking at before. But I'm gonna come in and use a container here, I'll use a flex container. Inside this flex container, this is going to give you a demonstration of how you can do different responsive layouts directly inside Ignition.

23:28
KM: So I'll come in, grab a compressor, I'm going to display this as different tanks, so maybe that's different values here that are coming through for different items, I'll pull this in as do a label, but I really want four different tanks, so just pick the wrong spot there. Go ahead and put another tank here, and I'll put in our last tank here. Then I'll set this up so that it's taking advantage of responsive design layout features. Right up here, I'm telling it to justify to space it evenly, I'm telling it to wrap, and then I'll also set this up so that it automatically resizes. So if I come over here and I drag from side to side, you can see as this dynamically changes based on my screen size. So if I'm running on a mobile device, it might look something like this. If I'm running on a desktop, it widens out. And as you can see, this is going to automatically adjust things as we go along. If I have a map component, that's sitting right down below this. That might be something that is automatically adjusted based on the components and the contents right above it. I can come in and say, "I wanna grow this guy." So it fills the whole screen right there. And then save this off.

24:49
KM: I might want to change some of the styling, so we mentioned CSS earlier, so no demonstration would be complete without showing off those features. We try to make everything click, drag and drop, easy to access and easy to adjust as possible. In this case, I'm going to pull up the style editor, which allows you to use the CSS here. And what I'm going to do, it doesn't look great to have these backed up right next to the map component below, so I go into this margin padding and I'll add a little bit of padding here. I'll hit okay right there. And now it's adjusted. Hit save. And that's gone off. If I wanna take a look at a more extensive style, of course, you've got a text, you can have color, font size, different things as we adjust this, so you can see it adjusting dynamically there. If I wanna change the weight, if I wanna make this bold, change the family, change the font color, if I wanted to, all of those are really easy to do. And then if you want to take one of those styles and make it accessible globally, we have this style section over here.

25:53
KM: So I can set up a new style, I can make these style classes set up however I want, and then apply them inside my project to the places that are appropriate. You can also set your styles to cascade as I mentioned earlier. So if we set styles at the root of an overall window, and anything that's not over-writing certain styles is going to take into account whatever we set to cascade from the root or from the parent containers for each one of the different components that's inside it. Someone said, "Can we see a connection to a point, what that looks like?" And I think I went through that really quickly, so I'll just slow down and do that one more time. I pulled in all of these points that we have on the left here. Basically, those came from the OPCUA server. I made a connection to a device right here. We have a variety of devices that are built-in for device drivers.

26:51
KM: If we go under our device connections, OPCUA device connections right here, and I create a new one, you can see the different drivers. And I just put it in and I gave it a name. If I'm connected broadly, open an IP address, and that's all I've gotta do. And then expand this out and you can see the tags inside that device or the points inside that device, and then pulling those into your tag tree is as simple as clicking and dragging, so I have the discharge pressure right there. Alright with that, I'm going to jump over and pass this back over to Don. And then we're going to get to a lot of these questions in the last 10 minutes here after you've seen it a little bit more. So with that, back over to you, Don.

27:35
DP: Kevin, thanks a lot for the demo, totally appreciate it. So we decided to go live with the world. It worked, we did it. Okay, good job, good job. So just a couple of things, I really appreciate Kevin doing a demo, but now let's take a look at a real working solution that was built in Perspective. I already introduced our speakers from ESM Australia, they built this solution for a waste management company called JJ Richards. So Tysan and Sam, you're with us now. If you were on mute, take yourself off mute. We're gonna... I know go through some screenshots that can be shown during as we discuss, but I wanted to talk a little bit and ask maybe a couple of questions overall before we actually move into the screenshots. So either they're... Either one of you can actually answer the questions, let's start with just overall, what was the problem you were trying to solve for your customer as you got into the project?

28:35
TG: Pass it. Thanks Don, I'll answer this one. A customer had a fleet of roughly 100 remote units and they didn't have an effective way to monitor them at the time, so they wanted the ability to view alarms, record performance history and generate trips for waste collection.

28:53
DP: Great, thanks. So I think we have an overview screen here that basically talks about some of the things that were part of that particular project. It was part of the solution you came up with. So can you kind of just... I mean, I know they're bullet points, but you wanna add anything about the IoT platform Cloud-based, mobile-ready, scalable, just a little bit more as to how the solution was built with these points in mind.

29:18
SB: Sure. So the customer was planning on using this platform with a variety of devices to access the system. So using the new Perspective module, module-containing components, we were able... The system was able to be designed to be responsive to devices with different resolutions. We also made use of the map component to visualize the status and the location of each unit. And use the geolocation feature to track the position of these trucks. In terms of the scale, we were using a standard of IIoT architecture, making use of the MQTT protocol to communicate with the sets. The Ignition gateway itself, as well as the database were both being posted on AWS. And in terms of the scale, the tags and things, there's approximately 3,000 tags total, so about 30 tags per unit. As Tysan said there has been 100 units in the system, these included about 2,400 alarms, and we were logging about 100 points of truck history as well.

30:35
DP: Thanks. That gives us a little bit of an idea of the scale and scope. I'm just curious about the geography. How many trucks are we talking about, if you know that number, and how many locations over what geography are we talking about?

30:51
SB: In terms of the number of units, there were just over 100, and they were distributed mostly across the states of Queensland and New South Wales, which are on the eastern side of Australia.

31:04
DP: Thanks. That gives us at least a little bit of an overview. So as we... Maybe one statement, then we can go into it as you go through some of the screens. So, from the viewpoint of the customer, how did they view the results in terms of performance improvements or savings or ROI? From the customer's viewpoint, what did they get from this project?

31:25
TG: So, client feedback has indicated that it's become a valuable addition to the operators. The alarming has increased reaction times to system faults and reducing downtime, and the alarm journaling that we introduced has allowed maintenance to recommend a replacement instead of repair. And overall the trip creation feature has improved logistics, which has saved administration resources, and it's also reduced costs of vehicles.

31:50
DP: That's great, thanks for the summary on that, so let's just take a look at... I'll let you guys move through the screens, I think you got mouse control. So, you can just move through the screens and give us a little bit of narrative as you go along for what you're showing and where it fits into the project.

32:07
SB: Sure, thanks. So yeah, this is just the home view, so this is opened on the session start-up, on the left, yeah, you can see the navigation menu as well, you've got some alarm details on the top right-hand corner there, this one. So, the next page you can see the administration page, the admin page, so this enables the management of the registered locations and also adding, deleting. So, this is a creation form, so the admin form, so this is used for creating new locations. This also makes use of the guide to source details on the clients, such as their business name, address, their geolocation. This is the tank levels view, so operators can monitor the tank levels and their history here, ordered by descending order. We have a tank performance pop-up as well. So, this displays the performance of each of the units. From here they can monitor operating accounts for each of the units, and they can view alarm history. And they can change some of the unit variables as well, such as the run time. Here we have a supervisor view. So, using this, supervisors can create trips within of them inside there to be allocated to drivers, so these are based on the tanks levels, the geolocation, and the pickup schedule as well.

33:42
TG: So, this is the operations view. With this view, drivers can request the trip using the button at the top, and once they're assigned a trip the map component will be refreshed, which will show the locations that they must visit. Next is the repair and maintenance view. This is showing a table with alarm history across all sites. And it could be filtered using the filter text editor just above, as seen here. So, in the top right of our menu we have an alarm active pop-up that can be brought up when you press on the alarm text, and this just shows the current alarms in the system. And we have the user management. This was just created so that administrators and management could make changes to the current users by adding, editing, and deleting, and then, it also has a functionality where users can just edit their own information. This is our driver tracking view. This displays the current geolocation of all trucks that are on the system at that time.

34:54
TG: Finally we have the depos view, which with administrative privileges can manage depos by adding, editing, and deleting. And all in all, Perspective has made this easy... Perspective made it easy to design and create one view, which can look great on many displays, so all these displays can be... They change automatically, depending on the device, between tablets, phones, and desktops.

35:23
DP: Sam, Tysan, thank you very much for... Actually, for really good showing the project. Great work. I gotta go into a Q&A now with our speakers today, so really, I think it really... If you really look at this over all, this really does set the bar for responsiveness, for flexibility, the visualization options, the remote monitoring and control, both from Kevin's demo and the great project done by ESM in Australia. Also, I just wanna know, this works alongside the Ignition Vision Module, which is a top class visualization system for traditional plant floor and desktop screens. If you're new to this world here, please, we're showing you what Perspective can do, but there's nothing like trying it for yourself. As Kevin mentioned earlier, you can download it, full version of Ignition 8, Ignition Perspective Module. Go to inductiveautomation.com, it just takes you a couple three minutes.

36:19
DP: Additionally, they have hundreds of videos, I think about 600, on Inductive University. It's online... We have an online users manual, so Inductive University is totally free, you can sign up, begin to work through the videos, earn your credential anywhere in the world on your own time with Inductive University videos and curriculum. So, please take advantage of that. It's a huge valuable knowledge transfer tool. Since we're less than a month out from the Ignition Community Conference 2019, I have to mention it's here, September 17th to 19th here in Folsom. You can get tickets at icc.inductive automation.com. We did sell out the last couple of years, and we're getting close now, but there are some seats left. Please, go there, join us. There's a ton of workshops, a lot of activity going on during that time. I think you're gonna see that the time is really worth it, plus Discover Gallery, projects like the one you saw today are in our Discover Gallery. We hope to see you then in Folsom. We now move to the Q&A section here. And I'll let you comment on it, Kevin. It has to do... It's from Ramon and he says, what security measures do you use to harness and secure sensitive data that is confidential and privileged?

37:34
KM: Yeah, yeah. So, we have a whole variety of tools that are available in the Ignition platform to secure things from at rest encryption from whatever database technologies using behind the scenes to active encryption on just about every connection that's going out from Ignition. We support identity providers from Perspective, so if you're connected to active directory, active directory federated services, being off the, all of that since it's ordered directly inside the platform.

38:00
DP: Excellent, excellent. So, in terms of Sam, you or Tysan, any comments you wanna make in terms of an answer to that question from... In relation to this project?

38:10
SB: Sure. Yeah, so, we... Probably the big one, we made use of the SSL setting in the gateway. So the connections to the gateway are encrypted. In addition to that, the data being transmitted via MQTT is also encrypted using this and so.

38:29
DP: Thanks so much. This is Levi's question, is there any way to use templates and template repeaters in perspective screens?

38:34
KM: Yeah, absolutely. So, those are called embedded views inside Perspective, and then there's a view repeater component that's very similar to how Vision has the template repeater. Property is, give it a dataset, it'll repeat whatever you tell it to repeat.

38:49
DP: Excellent. So you have a number of questions related to the demo that you did, so why don't you just fly through a bunch of them and then we'll get to a couple of questions and also go back to the ESM project?

38:58
KM: Sure thing. Alright, so let me jump through here, what's the cost of the Perspective module? We have the costs directly on our website. We're very transparent about what different things cost, and maybe Don knows that off the top of his head. But it's sitting right there and you could easily go to...

39:17
DP: Just go to the pricing page. [laughter] I don't know it off the top of my head.

39:20
KM: Alright. So, there was a question about break points. Absolutely, yeah, so you can set custom breakpoints wherever you want. There's a great point container that specifically lets you switch back and forth, so in addition to the flex layouts that we were showing, there's breakpoint containers that are part of it. The... Can you demo any sort of data entry? We have a demo project at demo.inductiveautomation.com that has a demonstration of data entry specifically right there. I'd encourage you to go right over there, it's real easy, and all of those project files are available and easy to just download and use and see how things were built out there. There were a few other questions about the Ignition running on a mobile phone. Yeah, obviously you can easily do that. We didn't demonstrate the connections to GPSs or GPS signals and some other things, but we can do that pretty easily.

40:20
KM: How can we do calculations and write formulas inside Ignition? We have both an expression language, we have SQL and we have Python, and all of those are really powerful ways to do that. We have expression tags, which can be running expressions all the time, or you can do it based on different triggers. Can Ignition source data to Power BI via OPC? Absolutely, so if the Power BI can connect over OPC UA, then certainly most folks who are using Power BI, if they want to source from Ignition, end up actually sourcing it from the database tables that Ignition storage data to, because it is really easy to do that. Does Ignition server run on Red Hat Linux? Yeah, absolutely. So we're across Linux distros, any major Linux distro, Ignition is going to be able to run on.

41:08
DP: I think this one... This is from Harry asking this question, I think this might be for you guys, Sam and Tysan, and I'm gonna... So he basically says, what are the various protocols used to communicate the machine with the Edge servers or direct IoT cloud? So, as regard to your project, maybe you can answer it, and then Kevin, you may wanna make a broader answer to that.

41:28
KM: Sure.

41:28
DP: So, Sam or Tysan?

41:30
TG: Let me see, in our project, we're using MQTT. We're using this just because... To begin with, the client has units that can use MQTT, but also, it's a very lightweight protocol, so having so many devices remote, it just allows us to keep the bandwidth low.

41:50
DP: So, I have one other question that I am curious about that I'm gonna ask Sam and Tysan, maybe each of you can give your own answer to it. Just personally in terms of your job and working with clients and working with Perspective and Ignition 8, anything you just wanna share with the audience as we're sort of wrapping up here about what you like about it? Is it fun? Is it good? Is it valuable? Anything you might wanna share just as, no pun intended here, your perspective on working with Perspective? So, over to you, Sam and Tysan.

42:21
SB: So far it's been really good, I think. I've had some experience with the 7.9 as well, version 7.9 before version 8, and I think the visual improvements have been really good. And in addition to the ability to set up screens to work on multiple devices easily has been really good as well. Those have been probably the biggest takeaways for us, and then also just accessibility. Being able to get... Accessing the application through your browser has been smooth, really good to work with.

42:58
DP: Hey, thanks, anything else though, for your final view?

43:02
TG: Yeah, I'd have to agree with Sam, how easy it is to design with and make it adaptable to different screens, especially with the Perspective module... Perspective app for Android, and iPhone. It makes it easy to give to clients and get them involved using it.

43:21
DP: That's great, thanks, Tysan. Oh, I didn't mention about the app for Android and iPhone, but you mentioned it, so thanks for bringing that up, because it is there for people to utilize. I also just wanna say an extra thank you to both you Sam and you Tysan for getting up very early there in Australia to join us for our webinar this morning. We got to start at a normal time here in Sacramento. [chuckle] So, I want to share another group of questions that I'm going to give Kevin another minute or two to answer before we end off here, and then we'll wrap it up.

43:52
KM: Yeah, you guys have been very active here, so I'm going to do another shot gun where I answer as much as I can or possibly can and as Don mentioned, whatever we don't get through, we'll definitely follow up via email. Do customers need... Customers need to have the vision module to use Perspective? No, you can use them standalone, you can use Vision or Perspective or both. I'll answer another question about that a little bit more extensively in just a second. How do you solve the problem, remote connections from a cell phone to Ignition? I'm glad somebody asked that. So, security is a very important piece of the Ignition platform. If you're doing a cell phone, just like we did today, and you have that hosted in a way that you can get to it without a VPN connection, we always recommend making a Gateway network connection that is read only. So we have security built into a Gateway network connections that are from one Ignition gateway to another, and there's a whole variety of security settings that let you walk that down.

44:47
KM: So you can have one system that's on your plant network, one system on corporate, one system on the Cloud, have different things exposed in different areas, or have that as locked down as you'd like. Most folks just have an on-prem system and then have a VPN connection to it, but if you do want to have access without a VPN connection, that's the way that you can do it. There is a question about differences between Perspective and the web dev module. Web dev is for custom web programming, Perspective, uh you just drag and drop the components and it builds things out for you. So if you've used the web dev module, most folks are using it now for doing restful endpoints as opposed to building out web pages. They're using Perspective for that for the most part. A little confused, the difference between Vision and Perspective? Vision is the desktop visualization, Perspective is the... So it's a full separate rich desktop application, whereas Perspective runs inside a web browser.

45:48
KM: And most of the differences between them are the form factor that they're running in, and whether or not they can access local device hardware or mobile sensors. We're happy to have a further conversation about that. We're supporting both of them going into the future, we think they're both really important technologies. Additional charting components coming? Yes, absolutely. So I just showed you one of the new charting components, which is the time series chart, but we have a whole variety that are planned. Perspective... Is Perspective aimed to replace Vision for all applications? Absolutely not. So they're intended to run side by side and complement each other. Folks who are running control rooms, we expect to run full desktop applications pretty much forever into the future and not run inside web browsers. And then lots of folks are demanding web browsers and they'll go the Perspective way, and the number of folks are doing mix and match applications where you have Vision and you have Perspective, and we think that that really gives you the richest design tool, if you get both of them. I've gone over my two minutes, [chuckle] so, I'll sit back, I'll let Don...

46:50
DP: But you utilized your time extremely well, Kevin, and there were a whole lot of questions, so I'm glad you did take the time to do that. And also our audience stayed with us, so apparently they wanted to hear your answers, so there are still more answers to come. I wanna thank everybody, we're taking a month off of webinars because we have our conference, which I promoted to you here in Folsom next month. We're back again in October with another webinar. Please keep up with us on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram. You can also subscribe to our weekly news feed via our website. I do wanna say, if you didn't get the idea today, we're very excited about the Perspective module about Ignition 8. For mobile first and mobile responsive applications, I really encourage you to get Perspective, start using it, go download it right now. You're gonna really find that it opens up so much innovative space for you as engineers, as integrators, as developers, to really use your imagination, pretty much anything. We say in Inductive Automation, one of our sayings is, dream it, do it, and I think with the Perspective module, it just opens up the capability to dream it, do it, even more so. So, thanks to everyone for your attention, have a fantastic day. We appreciate your attendance today.