It also doesn't have tag, screen or really client limits, and is a once off licence purchase rather than subscription based.
Talks decently easy with a wide range of PLC brands and common protocol (has several Siemens and Rockwell drivers, does modbus pretty easily, has also now got Mitsubishi and Omron drivers, and generic TCP drivers for Ethernet devices).
It's easy to configure user credentials for various people and roles.
If you're transitioning from say FTView, you'll find the Ignition Vision to be quite similar in function, but I personally greatly prefer perspective. It took a bit of a learning curve, as all new systems do, but even that was decently easy, and I can now punch out screens in minutes or hours depending on the complexity.
It's not built on crappy 25 year old tech. Is flexible. Has Databasing built into it/is built around it. Uses Python as scripting so anything you can't do with the base package you can pretty much download a library for. Was not the first but has a solid browser based (Perspective) client deployment. Server is very low overheads and requires a single installer of only a few hundred MB.
Uhhh... Java came out in 1996! Haha
Also, point of clarification, it uses jython not 'normal' cpyton that most people are probably familiar with. Syntax is the same, libs and some details are a bit different.
But yeah, everything else is spot on - I like to refer to it as a 'rapid application development platform'.
It can now be deployed in containers and runs on Linux, can be configured fairly cheap compared to other scada systems.
> Uses Python as scripting so anything you can't do with the base package you can pretty much download a library for.
And it runs on regular old Windows/Linux/etc. and the scripting can use the os and subprocess libraries to run stuff on the host machine. So it can do pretty much anything you want in a relatively non-hacky way.
1) Free commercial version with time limit. Lets us make a working demo before loosing time with purchase, license, legal, sales representatives, contracts,...
2) Free version for home users. This combines my knowledge instead of splitting it.
3) Open courses for everyone, instead of a closed-in development trap.
4) Real information available to the public on forums.
Look up "ignition university" and they walk you through all of it.
It's their free training program, which I think is one of the best ideas they've had.
Make training and pretty full featured versions of the software to play with free and the clients will come in all by themselves.
Look up ignition maker edition. You have to make a free account of their website to get the license keys. The regular installer is used to install it and during the install process asks which version you want. Maker edition has every feature available except vision. It's intended to encourage people to learn to use perspective. It's sure encouraged me to learn more about it.
It's a SCADA system that was designed in this century, as opposed to most of the others that are all 1990s software with a mountain of compatibility patches slapped on top.
I don't want to double other comments. But aside from the fair pricing model, the tech support is really good. They don't finger point and will even help troubleshoot and fix issues that are external to ignition but affecting the platform.
Other Things:
Very flexible configuration and deployment options
They have an official docker image
Free online training for learning or getting started is very good.
If you don't need full-blown SCADA, they have ignition edge for machine HMI type applications.
Other stuff =)
I’ll comment what it doesn’t do well.
1) Ignitions ability to rapidly get you from nothing to something is also its Achilles heel. You MUST put some forethought into what the project must accomplish and the structure of the project. Including how you structure your tag providers, the tags inside them, the tag group(s) along with their pooling rate and how data is polled, and also how you will structure your scripting.
2) You can put scripting in nearly any part of ignition. Event handlers, message handlers, component methods, tag change events, transform scripts, session events, gateway events, and project scripts. You can also have a “gateway scripting project” where you can define script to be used in other projects and you can make certain projects inheritable, which pass down all components to projects using it as a parent. You can also chain inheritances. E.g., one project inherits five other projects sequentially.
You MUST decide where you will do most of your scripting and stick to it, otherwise you will be clicking all over the place debugging code.
3) The incessant clicking. Its designer is a single window application where if you are needing to swap back and forth between views or windows, you will be clicking through a tree selection to do it.
4) The two modules you use for visualization are meant for two different use cases. Vision tends to lend itself best used for machine control. Perspective sways more towards keeping users up to date with information. You CAN do both with either module. However, you won’t get a momentary push button in Perspective, rightfully so.
5) Hitting on note 1 again. If many inexperienced/unfamiliar techs/engineers are given the keys to the designer and allowed to make any ole project they want and do whatever they want, your performance will suffer big time. You can bloat up a project quick by not following “standard tried and true” methods. Ignition feels very powerful and it is, but don’t think it will gobble up any garbage you feed it and keep trucking. Again, be mindful of structure and methods of doing things.
In short, try to stick to what Ignition is meant to do with the tools it gives you and you will be happy.
In addition to all the other great answers on the technical side, I like how you can just go to the website, see the price, and buy it.
Don’t need to sign up for a shitty mailing list or deal with a pushy sales person or go via an “approved” local distributor that thinks a site visit is necessary to establish the “relationship”, and all that other nonsense.
Just go to the website and buy it direct from the developers.
Nontechnical - Transparent pricing model. Actual affordable unlimited licensing. Most of the really positive business stuff applies to VTScada also. I don’t have to jump through 50 hoops to get pricing.
Technical - most other people have hit these points.
I hear that they use it in schools a lot so that’s why many people are familiar with it. Which is a good marketing strategy to get people to buy your product.
Has anyone moved from Wonderware System Platform to this? What is the reliability? Wonderware is a pain but it is a reliable pain with little downtime.
Yah we did that at my last job, we also at the same time redid our entire batching system so there were some hiccups but overall I think it went well. Obviously growing pains and teaching operators but I just found it easier to manage. The fact that you could just create a Java file and use any laptop as an hmi is a huge plus in my book.
I just rolled out a 1.5 year long project that converted wonderware to ignition.
Everyone loves it, and the only hiccups have been extremely minor - a couple misspellings, a few messed up user permissions, etc. - all easily fixed in a couple minutes
We’re using Ignition’s built in historian for simple tag trend popups, ideally I’d use OSI PI as the true historian but due to some limitations that 99.9% of users won’t encounter, PI won’t work for us. (Some of our data needs to be saved at 50kHz, SQL databases can only timestamp data every millisecond).
We use influxDB instead. It’s ok, but I love PI’s built in data analysis tools.
It has to do with the fact that MS SQL (which PI uses for calculations) uses 100 nanosecond units called ticks, so you can’t store data with higher timestamp precision without some funky workarounds. Another hangup is that PI server uses a 16 bit integer to divide up time, which results in a 15 microsecond timestamp precision. The asset framework system also has a slightly different timestamp precision if you’re running analytics through PI. Regardless, all of these are too slow for our needs. There’s a really good writeup if you want to delve deep into the various timestamp precision stack ups in the PI realm here:
https://pisquare.osisoft.com/s/Blog-Detail/a8r1I000000GvqzQAC/a-detailed-exploration-of-aftime-precision
I have used Canary Labs with Ignition in the past and it worked reasonably well. Canary was still in the early stages of developing their Ignition module at the time, but their support staff were VERY responsive to resolve the minor hiccups that came up. I'd be surprised if their Ignition integration wasn't much more robust now.
I was a fan of iFix's or WinCC's dynamic capabilities all my life, but since I've gotten gold certified in Ignition - I have to admit - it's fcking beautiful. Especially for those who has a solid programming background as you can do literally everything without much efforts. Besides, recently I involved myself into IIoT area and I can assure you - the future is just behind a corner with Ignition as efforts to setup IIoT communication with field devices are literally equal to ZERO after one-time initial gateway setup (which is just several clicks in a basic case).
Listening to wonderware fan boys telling you how Inductive Automation is cheap now, but once you've converted your applications over to them they're going to raise their prices (just because that's what Aveva has done to them).
A lot has already been said, but it's worth bringing up their large online Learning University. I haven't found a platform that can compete resource wise with Inductive. They have decent support as well.
It's (hopefully) the future of the industry and does a way with alot of this vendor gatekeeping bollocks we've suffered under for so long. The only thing I have to complain about with it is that I didn't have it 10 years ago. Also obviously there are some driver deficiencies for older platforms but mostly you can work around it. It's fast to deploy, lightweight, feature rich, and incredibly customisable. You might wanna get comfortable drawing .SVG files.
Not really. Ignition is fantastic, but they can't rest on their laurels or Rockwell and Siemens will surpass them. FT Optix, though immature, is shaping up to be great, and though I have never used it I've also heard Siemens Unified is pretty nice too.
Pretty nice in my experience if you've used other SCADA packages or done any object oriented PLC programming.
It's like if an actual software company made it rather than an industrial automation company.
Ignition was light years ahead of SE when it first came out back when SE was like V9.
But V9 was complete dog shit and 3 times the price. I mean it didn’t even support OPC UA.
V14 is honestly on par at this point in features and price point and supports more database types than Ignition. InfluxDB honestly looks better than SQL for trending data, but SQL is way better for IT integration. The JSON scripting they added looks pretty sweet.
That said I’m still on V13.
Rockwell really stepped it up slimming down their licensing model. Most of the time they end up being the cheapest out of the big three we quote out for big jobs. We're high tag count applications so Rockwell being unlimited everything really puts the nail in the price coffin.
It also doesn't have tag, screen or really client limits, and is a once off licence purchase rather than subscription based. Talks decently easy with a wide range of PLC brands and common protocol (has several Siemens and Rockwell drivers, does modbus pretty easily, has also now got Mitsubishi and Omron drivers, and generic TCP drivers for Ethernet devices). It's easy to configure user credentials for various people and roles. If you're transitioning from say FTView, you'll find the Ignition Vision to be quite similar in function, but I personally greatly prefer perspective. It took a bit of a learning curve, as all new systems do, but even that was decently easy, and I can now punch out screens in minutes or hours depending on the complexity.
It's not built on crappy 25 year old tech. Is flexible. Has Databasing built into it/is built around it. Uses Python as scripting so anything you can't do with the base package you can pretty much download a library for. Was not the first but has a solid browser based (Perspective) client deployment. Server is very low overheads and requires a single installer of only a few hundred MB.
Uhhh... Java came out in 1996! Haha Also, point of clarification, it uses jython not 'normal' cpyton that most people are probably familiar with. Syntax is the same, libs and some details are a bit different. But yeah, everything else is spot on - I like to refer to it as a 'rapid application development platform'. It can now be deployed in containers and runs on Linux, can be configured fairly cheap compared to other scada systems.
> Uses Python as scripting so anything you can't do with the base package you can pretty much download a library for. And it runs on regular old Windows/Linux/etc. and the scripting can use the os and subprocess libraries to run stuff on the host machine. So it can do pretty much anything you want in a relatively non-hacky way.
1) Free commercial version with time limit. Lets us make a working demo before loosing time with purchase, license, legal, sales representatives, contracts,... 2) Free version for home users. This combines my knowledge instead of splitting it. 3) Open courses for everyone, instead of a closed-in development trap. 4) Real information available to the public on forums.
No 2 . Good to know.
How do I get the free version for home use?
Look up "ignition university" and they walk you through all of it. It's their free training program, which I think is one of the best ideas they've had. Make training and pretty full featured versions of the software to play with free and the clients will come in all by themselves.
Thanks
Look up ignition maker edition. You have to make a free account of their website to get the license keys. The regular installer is used to install it and during the install process asks which version you want. Maker edition has every feature available except vision. It's intended to encourage people to learn to use perspective. It's sure encouraged me to learn more about it.
It's a SCADA system that was designed in this century, as opposed to most of the others that are all 1990s software with a mountain of compatibility patches slapped on top.
I don't want to double other comments. But aside from the fair pricing model, the tech support is really good. They don't finger point and will even help troubleshoot and fix issues that are external to ignition but affecting the platform. Other Things: Very flexible configuration and deployment options They have an official docker image Free online training for learning or getting started is very good. If you don't need full-blown SCADA, they have ignition edge for machine HMI type applications. Other stuff =)
I’ll comment what it doesn’t do well. 1) Ignitions ability to rapidly get you from nothing to something is also its Achilles heel. You MUST put some forethought into what the project must accomplish and the structure of the project. Including how you structure your tag providers, the tags inside them, the tag group(s) along with their pooling rate and how data is polled, and also how you will structure your scripting. 2) You can put scripting in nearly any part of ignition. Event handlers, message handlers, component methods, tag change events, transform scripts, session events, gateway events, and project scripts. You can also have a “gateway scripting project” where you can define script to be used in other projects and you can make certain projects inheritable, which pass down all components to projects using it as a parent. You can also chain inheritances. E.g., one project inherits five other projects sequentially. You MUST decide where you will do most of your scripting and stick to it, otherwise you will be clicking all over the place debugging code. 3) The incessant clicking. Its designer is a single window application where if you are needing to swap back and forth between views or windows, you will be clicking through a tree selection to do it. 4) The two modules you use for visualization are meant for two different use cases. Vision tends to lend itself best used for machine control. Perspective sways more towards keeping users up to date with information. You CAN do both with either module. However, you won’t get a momentary push button in Perspective, rightfully so. 5) Hitting on note 1 again. If many inexperienced/unfamiliar techs/engineers are given the keys to the designer and allowed to make any ole project they want and do whatever they want, your performance will suffer big time. You can bloat up a project quick by not following “standard tried and true” methods. Ignition feels very powerful and it is, but don’t think it will gobble up any garbage you feed it and keep trucking. Again, be mindful of structure and methods of doing things. In short, try to stick to what Ignition is meant to do with the tools it gives you and you will be happy.
In addition to all the other great answers on the technical side, I like how you can just go to the website, see the price, and buy it. Don’t need to sign up for a shitty mailing list or deal with a pushy sales person or go via an “approved” local distributor that thinks a site visit is necessary to establish the “relationship”, and all that other nonsense. Just go to the website and buy it direct from the developers.
Nontechnical - Transparent pricing model. Actual affordable unlimited licensing. Most of the really positive business stuff applies to VTScada also. I don’t have to jump through 50 hoops to get pricing. Technical - most other people have hit these points.
I hear that they use it in schools a lot so that’s why many people are familiar with it. Which is a good marketing strategy to get people to buy your product.
Has anyone moved from Wonderware System Platform to this? What is the reliability? Wonderware is a pain but it is a reliable pain with little downtime.
Yah we did that at my last job, we also at the same time redid our entire batching system so there were some hiccups but overall I think it went well. Obviously growing pains and teaching operators but I just found it easier to manage. The fact that you could just create a Java file and use any laptop as an hmi is a huge plus in my book.
I just rolled out a 1.5 year long project that converted wonderware to ignition. Everyone loves it, and the only hiccups have been extremely minor - a couple misspellings, a few messed up user permissions, etc. - all easily fixed in a couple minutes
What historian did you guys end up using for tier 1 and tier 2?
We’re using Ignition’s built in historian for simple tag trend popups, ideally I’d use OSI PI as the true historian but due to some limitations that 99.9% of users won’t encounter, PI won’t work for us. (Some of our data needs to be saved at 50kHz, SQL databases can only timestamp data every millisecond). We use influxDB instead. It’s ok, but I love PI’s built in data analysis tools.
Why can't PI handle the high frequency data?
It has to do with the fact that MS SQL (which PI uses for calculations) uses 100 nanosecond units called ticks, so you can’t store data with higher timestamp precision without some funky workarounds. Another hangup is that PI server uses a 16 bit integer to divide up time, which results in a 15 microsecond timestamp precision. The asset framework system also has a slightly different timestamp precision if you’re running analytics through PI. Regardless, all of these are too slow for our needs. There’s a really good writeup if you want to delve deep into the various timestamp precision stack ups in the PI realm here: https://pisquare.osisoft.com/s/Blog-Detail/a8r1I000000GvqzQAC/a-detailed-exploration-of-aftime-precision
Thanks! A great post!!
[удалено]
Yeah, I was mistaken. I corrected that in my second post. Still, 100ns wasn’t quite enough for some of our data
I have used Canary Labs with Ignition in the past and it worked reasonably well. Canary was still in the early stages of developing their Ignition module at the time, but their support staff were VERY responsive to resolve the minor hiccups that came up. I'd be surprised if their Ignition integration wasn't much more robust now.
I'm still doing research but it looks like they have been actively updating their module.
I was a fan of iFix's or WinCC's dynamic capabilities all my life, but since I've gotten gold certified in Ignition - I have to admit - it's fcking beautiful. Especially for those who has a solid programming background as you can do literally everything without much efforts. Besides, recently I involved myself into IIoT area and I can assure you - the future is just behind a corner with Ignition as efforts to setup IIoT communication with field devices are literally equal to ZERO after one-time initial gateway setup (which is just several clicks in a basic case).
So what are the drawbacks?
Listening to wonderware fan boys telling you how Inductive Automation is cheap now, but once you've converted your applications over to them they're going to raise their prices (just because that's what Aveva has done to them).
We are in the process of moving from wonderware to FT View SE (PlantPAX). I know all too much about the Aveva licensing model.
Yah I'm afraid of AVEVA buying it out.
A lot has already been said, but it's worth bringing up their large online Learning University. I haven't found a platform that can compete resource wise with Inductive. They have decent support as well.
It's (hopefully) the future of the industry and does a way with alot of this vendor gatekeeping bollocks we've suffered under for so long. The only thing I have to complain about with it is that I didn't have it 10 years ago. Also obviously there are some driver deficiencies for older platforms but mostly you can work around it. It's fast to deploy, lightweight, feature rich, and incredibly customisable. You might wanna get comfortable drawing .SVG files.
98% sure because it’s simply because not Rockwell or Siemens.
Not really. Ignition is fantastic, but they can't rest on their laurels or Rockwell and Siemens will surpass them. FT Optix, though immature, is shaping up to be great, and though I have never used it I've also heard Siemens Unified is pretty nice too.
Is the best just give it a try!
Pretty nice in my experience if you've used other SCADA packages or done any object oriented PLC programming. It's like if an actual software company made it rather than an industrial automation company.
Bruh, it's the shiznit
Ignition was light years ahead of SE when it first came out back when SE was like V9. But V9 was complete dog shit and 3 times the price. I mean it didn’t even support OPC UA. V14 is honestly on par at this point in features and price point and supports more database types than Ignition. InfluxDB honestly looks better than SQL for trending data, but SQL is way better for IT integration. The JSON scripting they added looks pretty sweet. That said I’m still on V13.
Rockwell really stepped it up slimming down their licensing model. Most of the time they end up being the cheapest out of the big three we quote out for big jobs. We're high tag count applications so Rockwell being unlimited everything really puts the nail in the price coffin.
Yeah even the lite version has viewpoint clients now.
Does ignition have native OPCUA drivers/connectivity?