New HMI

[Controls Guy]

Mark and I were just discussing the possibility of designing an HMI-centric subset of our programming protocol that would be fully documented and exposed via a different IP port number. Maybe go so far as to allow each block and heap item as being visible through it our not, and beef up the security to a high degree.

Cool idea!

For now, though, I'm loving Modbus...it just works.

Agreed.

[deep6ixed]

For now I would be happy if we had a simple XML file we could access from Ethernet.  Even that much could really open the doors for some interesting applications.  I wrote a PHP XML parser that would read an XML file from each machine (http://machineip/status.xml) and our supervisor could call up the entire plant from his computer in real time.

But this required us to install ethernet I/O units designed just for that job.  If we had a file we could poll that could give us the values of specific addresses I think it could be a big help. We can use Modbus, but for web app development I've only seen one modbus library.

Ill look into seeing what I can make the Modbus Lib I posted earlier do.  Anyone know of a good Modbus/TCP simulator I can use to test with?  Would rather not use homemade code on a production machine if I can help it.