Hi all. I have a water authority that wants to control the pumps and monitor water levels using Canopy. The devices are HMI and PLC devices. I have read that this can done. What equipment do I need to interface with the canopy equipment?
Thanks for your assistance,
Donald
Nice… they have their own frequencies but they want to use unlicensed…
It all depends on how the HMI wants to talk to the PLCs. Will they be using serial or Ethernet data? If the HMI will be using TCP/UDP and the PLCs support this then all you need is cable. If the HMI and PLCs want to talk via serial communications then you will need a way to translate the serial data into TCP/UDP for transport across the Canopy network (serial/IP converter of some sort).
Aaron
This is exactly the application that we are working on. I’m working on a Canopy network for the water and sewer utility. They have mainly allen bradley PLC’s with AENT adapters (ethernet adapter). Difference is, we have written our own HMI which is just a web application. This makes it pretty simple to just browse to the HMI screens. The easiest solution for you would probably be to put a VPN capable router on the network and set the current HMI machine up for remote capabilities (VNC or Remote Desktop). If any monitoring or controlling needs to be done, they can just VPN into the HMI machine and you would be good to go. This will save them from having to purchase another HMI license to put on a remote machine which will save mega $$. Hope that helps, if not, let me know, I could get much more in depth!!