Working on a project that is extremely large and running into performance issues with the C-more that we've been using extensively for a long time. We've got over a thousand tags on a single screen and hundreds of screens in the project. Anyone have recommendations for an HMI that's higher performance than the C-more and can speak Domore symbolic? We're looking for either a headless type solution where we can supply our own large touch monitor or something with a screen that's around 19".
What kind of update rate are you looking for? Do the tags not on the active screen have to be updated anyway, perhaps for logging? Some HMI's (not sure about C-More) only poll tags necessary for the current screen or logging. How many tags are there total? Hundreds of thousands or is there a lot of overlap?
I've never done anything like that but it wouldn't surprise me if to get the bandwidth you need you might end up streaming data from the source PLC. Also, I think you'd get better performance if there is a lot of logging beyond the animation-visible tags, if there were a database machine collecting and logging the data, and then maybe the HMI could get animation data from the database server as a secondary process (probably tag writes would still go to the PLC).
PC-based HMI's like DAQ Factory might help. Many have scripting capability and allow you more control over polling. Some of them can also be used with OPC servers, which would give you another option to pursue.
Finally, will Do-More act as a E/IP producer? The response time on E/IP messages is in the microseconds. Not sure about poll rate, but it has to be pretty good.
