Acromag I/O Station

[Bob Zigmund]

I am getting ready to start a project that will possibly use BridgeVIEW.
I have a couple questions that may help my decision. The installed hardware
is mainly Acromag series 4000 I/O stations. These are serial devices and
I have written some LabVIEW code to control one for a previous project.
In this project I will be working with several of them to control and monitor
different ongoing tests. My questions are:

1. Can I use the previous LabVIEW driver within BridgeVIEW to control the
stations? What advantages/drawbacks will there be to this?

2. I don't have an OPC driver for the Acromag, will I need one? How much
effort is required to develop one and is there any source that might already
have one?

3. What advantage does Brid
geVIEW give me over just using LabVIEW to develop
the whole project?

Any light that anyone can shed on any of these questions is very much welcome.
If you want more details of the project, please feel free to contact me directly.

TIA,
Bob

[sz]

"Bob Zigmund" wrote:
>>I am getting ready to start a project that will possibly use BridgeVIEW.
>I have a couple questions that may help my decision. The installed hardware>is
mainly Acromag series 4000 I/O stations. These are serial devices and>I
have written some LabVIEW code to control one for a previous project. >In
this project I will be working with several of them to control and monitor>different
ongoing tests. My questions are:>>1. Can I use the previous LabVIEW driver
within BridgeVIEW to control the>stations? What advantages/drawbacks will
there be to this?>>2. I don't have an OPC driver for the Acromag, will I
need one? How much>effort is required to develop one and is there any source
that might already>have one?>>3. What advantage does BridgeVIEW give me over
just using LabVIEW to develop>the whole project?>>Any light that anyone can
shed on any of these questions is very much welcome.>If you want more details
of the project, please feel free to contact me directly.>>TIA,>Bob

Bob,
here are the answer to your questions:
1. BridgeVIEW is a superset of LabVIEW. You can use any LabVIEW function
in BridgeVIEW without any problem. The disadvantage of using LabVIEW function
to talk to your devices is that you will not be able to take full advantage
of the BridgeVIEW built-in tools for device connectivity, such as OPC interface,
historical logging (built-in database), alarm & event management. If you
want to use the LabVIEW driver you will have to do some programming to take
advantage of the BridgeVIEW tools.
2. The recommended way to talk to any industrial device is via OPC. You can
either develop an OPC server (C programming knowledge is required)with an
OPC toolkit (for example FactorySoft)or you contact the device vendor (Acromag)
to see if they have an OPC server.
3. BridgeVIEW has built-in tools to help you develop monitoring and control
applications, such historical logging (database included), real-time trending,
security, alarm&events handling, PLC connectivity via OPC.

Hope this helps.
Best regards

Stefano Zanetti
BridgeVIEW Marketing Manager
National Instruments