cRIO Running Labview as OPC Client

[wjh_2000]

We are designing an industrial control system and plan on using a number of cRIO card cages running Labview to support the interface to the sensors and control points to each system.  A recommendation has been made to use Wonderware’s InTouch development application to create the Human Machine Interface (HMI) for the system.  What is the best way to implement the communications between the InTouch HMI and the cRIO card cages running Labview, when the InTouch HMI application uses a OPC network protocol and the cRIOs use the NI Publish-Subscribe Protocol (NI-PSP).  I saw a Datalogging and Supervisory Control (DSC) module that is used to provide OPC Client support.  Can this DSC module be used with the cRIO system or does the DSC module run only on a PC?

Below are 2 ways I see the communications between the InTouch HMI application and the cRIO card cage being implemented.

In scenario #1, a PC running NI OPC Server provides the translation from the OPC protocol to the NI-PSP protocol.  In scenario #2 a generic OPC Server communicates directly to the cRIO card cages and the Shared Variable Engine provides the translation to Labview.

What is the best way to communicate between the Wonderware InTouch OPC client and the cRIO card cage running Labview.

Thanks,

Wayne

[Finnabon]

Hi Wayne, 

The SVE running on the Windows host is actually an OPC Server itself. You should be able to bind directly to the National Instruments Shared Variable Engine from the HMI OPC Client.

http://digital.ni.com/public.nsf/allkb/E0F3FC734365E36F862576430083A3F7?OpenDocument

If you do not want the Windows host in your system, you can install the NI DSC module which supports OPC-UA server/client on the cRIO. Note, you must be using LabVIEW 2011 SP1 or greater and the InTouch HMI must support OPC-UA as well.

Let me know if you have any further questions!

Allie