Good day folks. As some of you may know from some of my stories here, my boss always likes to take on new and interesting projects he comes across, especially if there's a lot of money involved, so he ropes in average Joes like yours truly for the job, even though they've never done said thing before, so you only have like 1 week to learn it
This year's trend and topic seems to be all about IoT and SCADA systems....big topic, so I really don't know where to start with this. I know what it is and I understand the concept, so I guess the best place to start is the beginning: what we want to achieve.....we're not entirely sure yet, so this is mostly going to be a speculative discussion, discussing the good, the bad, the ugly, the dos and don't, ins and outs of SCADA.
From what I understand, the end goal of all this hype is going to be for us to be able to take over the maintenance and operation of some floodgates....yes, that's right ! Not some small insignificant prototype device on a workbench, but actual goddamn floodgates, complete with ships passing through and everything ! We're not going to go into management stuff here because I don't (want to) know that part myself, but from what I gather, the contract between this compound and the company currently in charge of support is about to expire and of course our boss wants to take over at that point....cool
It's very early to know anything about the systems or particular equipment they're using, though I HAVE been in the control room once and saw the monitors showing the schematic representation of the compound and the different parameters and stats of the valves, sensors, pumps, servos, along with the main gates themselves. Aside from the sheer scale of the thing we're talking about here, it's not really that spectacular in the grand scheme of things: a PC interfaces with some widgets via (what seems to be called) a "HMI" and back....that's SCADA.
Now to make our own I found a variety of resources online, ranging from small DIY stuff based on Arduino, to proper industrial-grade devices, which is what these guys actually use. The software used also seems to be diverse, again, ranging from stuff some chap wrote himself in Visual Studio, to industry-standard programs that comes with the hardware used there. I'm not a software buff as you may know, so this is where I'd like some help first.....suggestions ? What should we use ? Simple-Scada looks like a nice pre-made piece of software I found, though it seems to be in Russian, and of course we can go full-DIY by using Visual Studio itself to at least play with some pre-made programs, since I'm not sure I'd be able to learn C# like that
If I understand correctly, it works like this: the PC program with its visual interface the user clicks on spits out some commands over a COMx port via a MODBUS (?) protocol. The Arduino set to the matching COM port and baud rate like any serial device, with a MODBUS library loaded onto it, responds accordingly to either read something, or issue a command to an output...plenty of stuff to talk about here...
This year's trend and topic seems to be all about IoT and SCADA systems....big topic, so I really don't know where to start with this. I know what it is and I understand the concept, so I guess the best place to start is the beginning: what we want to achieve.....we're not entirely sure yet, so this is mostly going to be a speculative discussion, discussing the good, the bad, the ugly, the dos and don't, ins and outs of SCADA.
From what I understand, the end goal of all this hype is going to be for us to be able to take over the maintenance and operation of some floodgates....yes, that's right ! Not some small insignificant prototype device on a workbench, but actual goddamn floodgates, complete with ships passing through and everything ! We're not going to go into management stuff here because I don't (want to) know that part myself, but from what I gather, the contract between this compound and the company currently in charge of support is about to expire and of course our boss wants to take over at that point....cool
It's very early to know anything about the systems or particular equipment they're using, though I HAVE been in the control room once and saw the monitors showing the schematic representation of the compound and the different parameters and stats of the valves, sensors, pumps, servos, along with the main gates themselves. Aside from the sheer scale of the thing we're talking about here, it's not really that spectacular in the grand scheme of things: a PC interfaces with some widgets via (what seems to be called) a "HMI" and back....that's SCADA.
Now to make our own I found a variety of resources online, ranging from small DIY stuff based on Arduino, to proper industrial-grade devices, which is what these guys actually use. The software used also seems to be diverse, again, ranging from stuff some chap wrote himself in Visual Studio, to industry-standard programs that comes with the hardware used there. I'm not a software buff as you may know, so this is where I'd like some help first.....suggestions ? What should we use ? Simple-Scada looks like a nice pre-made piece of software I found, though it seems to be in Russian, and of course we can go full-DIY by using Visual Studio itself to at least play with some pre-made programs, since I'm not sure I'd be able to learn C# like that
If I understand correctly, it works like this: the PC program with its visual interface the user clicks on spits out some commands over a COMx port via a MODBUS (?) protocol. The Arduino set to the matching COM port and baud rate like any serial device, with a MODBUS library loaded onto it, responds accordingly to either read something, or issue a command to an output...plenty of stuff to talk about here...
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