Hi Claes,
I'm looking for recommendations about which brands of PLC are the most appropriate to use in a Linux-only, ProviewR-based SCADA system. I specifically want to know if there are any Linux-friendly enough, yet powerful and reliable PLC options available, so that I would no longer have to worry about the necessity of using Microsoft Windows, just to program the PLC. Also, since ProviewR is internally used in SSAB, I would like to know about how this problem is handled there.

/Maverick

Hi Maverick,

This is how we build our control systems. We have three different kind of nodes, operator, storage and process stations. All three run debian with the pwrrt package installed.

The operator station is an ordinary pc with one or several sceens.

The storage station has a set of raid disks and mariadb installed. Nowadays it's often run as a virtual machine in a cluster.

The process station runs debian with realtime patches from OSADL installed for better realtime performance. It also has interfaces to the process via IO cards or field busses. We use PSS9000 cards attached to the local bus, or Profinet to communicate with frequency converters or Siemens et200 devices. The hardware is an industrial pc the we put together ourselves. All plc code is executed in the process stations except if there is any logic for emergency breaks, safety gates etc, where we use safe plc from ABB and Siemens.

So we don't use any PLC and my knowledge of brands are very limited. For us it's a great advantage to have all nodes on the same platform and totally integrated with each other.

/Claes

Hi Claes,

I am a beginner with Proview and I try to develop a small DCS to control a thermochemical process.
Concerning hardware, maybe it is a silly question but I would like to be sure : can an operator station be an industrial PC with a touch screen or must it be a traditionnal PC with a keyboard and mouse? And then could you confirm that it would be the pwrrt package to be installed on such an operator station?

thank you.
Best Regards,
Brice

Hi Brice,

We use touch screens in som places and they are configured as ordinary operator stations with the pwrrt package installed. The only difference is that VirtualKeyboard is specified in Options in the OpPlace object. This can be set also on a ordinary PC if you want to check out the virtual keyboard functionality. You can also specify for each input field if an alphabetic or numeric keyboard should be displayed.

/Claes