Hi,
it been a while since I used KepServer and I have a new project scope that's got me scratching my head a bit.
We have a requirement to automate production test data acquisition where there is nothing currently in place. There are no OPC enabled drivers at all for the instrumentation types that we use. We're building the back office tooling (SQL DB, internal web services etc) to support quite complex product assembly and testing, where manual data entry is needed. The final step is to provision device level integration to bypass the need for manual data entry. Typically, the multiple (5) USB devices are tethered to a local PC, each with proprietary data communication.
I'm looking for a confident way forward. The concept I'm working with is to centralise the data on an instance of KEPServerEX, with local OPC servers running on the PC hosts that harvest the production data from the locally connected devices. KepServerEx is the product I know from the past, I am only just now finding out about ThingWorx.
What model has the greatest flexibility and scalability that balances license costs with a reasonable amount of development? Should I be hand-crafting a local OPC server tailored to the production process, or using local KepServer instances and develop at the driver plug in level? What about developing the local connectivity as an OPC client and writing to a centralised OPC server, is that a viable approach? IIRC LinkMaster is needed to marshal data between Servers, or does KEPServerEX have the capability to read from another server?
Cheers! Any pointers greatly appreciated.
Matt
