EcoStruxure Geo SCADA Expert Ideas

There are other HMIs which use systems similar to how Geo SCADA allows database referencing with animations on mimic components. While reviewing a legacy system prior to a conversion to Geo SCADA, it was noted that while their system also utilized global references for colors, it also displayed the resulting color at the other end of the reference. We are trying to implement as many global color references as possible, to minimize change time for when users inevitably wish to change them. As such, when colors start being integrated into flowcharts, it becomes hard to see the flow (particularly if the reference is too long for the 'flowchart' diagram). It would be really convenient if the references to a CCustomColour object reflected that color in the flowchart boxes, like the RGB() expressions do.     ... View more

It would be nice to have the ability to overlay region objects on a GIS map.  We've implemented a few systems that have defined polygon shapes that match up with an "area" or "route" and the ability to have these visualized on a map and possibly color coded with the name of the region in the middle of it would be very helpful.    The GIS Region objects have the ability to provide context to your alarms and devices.  GIS region objects fail to provide context when looking at a GIS map though.  Say you have 3 regions defined and all of the devices fall within one of those regions.  When you pull up a map, all you see is the devices and no relationship to a region.  I see this as a huge missed opportunity.    You can play around with geojson.io, doodle up some polygons, and get a feel for what I mean.    ... View more

It is easy to convert points between different functional types, or to convert abstract points to functional points.  What is not easy is to convert a point in a template back to abstract.  There are many reasons you might want to do this (e.g. accidental conversion of the point in the template to a functional type, or an existing template that could have expanded use if you could retrospectively convert an existing point to abstract).   I would envisage that converting a template point back to abstract would be done in such a way that all existing instances of the template are ultimately unchanged and would match the CRC they had prior to the change.  Once that point is abstract, you would then have the option to convert individual points in individual instances back to abstract as well. ... View more

We have several customers with very large SCADA systems that are worked on by multiple integrators. We have a test/dev system setup and on the network with a production setup. We do our development on the test system and then export our changes and import on the production system.   This usually goes well and without much trouble. However, if some integrators don't follow a proper change management procedure (e.g. updating a template on test but forgetting to update it on production) then the two databases will drift over time. In an effort to reduce our admin and change management workload it would be excellent to be able to develop and test on the dev system and then have a "promote changes to prod" feature.   As an extension of this process it would be good for the system to evaluate parent objects (templates, embedded mimics) for changes and publish those to production before publishing any inherited objects. This could have a dialogue box similar to the delete dialogue. "Publishing to production will impact the following objects and make the following changes:" and list the impacted objects with the parent objects first and inherited objects last.    Further expansion on the idea: have the ability to have a configuration field to prevent publishing certain objects. There are some cases where we always want test/production objects to be different. E.g. communications settings, system headers, etc.. ... View more

We often don't want the geospatial map to be the only view. It would be good if it was possible to embed such a map within an existing mimic. ... View more

I was at a customer site a week or two back and the customer asked if it was possible to historize string and time points yet.  They've been long time users so me breaking the news that it wasn't possible wasn't really the end of the world.  That said, it would be nice if this was possible.  The use case would be for storing enumerations for values that go beyond what a 3 bit discrete can provide today.  We commonly run into situations where an analog value has to be used to bring back a value of 1-x where the value represents a first out.  We'd use ST or a calc point to push the string enumeration for what it means to a string point, but the string point is never historized.  If we ever had to go back and figure out what it was, we'd have to pair up the history with an enumeration table in order to make life easier. ... View more

A few of our customers have web applications that are closely related to their SCADA systems, but are still separate. This is for things like 'Asset Management Systems', 'Service Request / Work Order Ticket Systems', 'Alarm Analysis Systems', 'Alarm Instruction Systems'   At the moment we are launching an external web browser session for each of these, but many of them would be 'nicer' if they remained within the SCADA environment entirely, and didn't disrupt the display of SCADA data (i.e. by popping up over SCADA data, or by taking over the entire SCADA display window).   It would be ideal if it was possible to have an embedded display, within an existing Mimic, that could show a web page, with the URL of the webpage able to be driven by an animation / script action, OR by action within the embedded web page (i.e. if just clicking a hyperlink within the web page). ... View more

It would be a welcomed addition to have the SQL Export objects have an additional property to export time columns as the local server time when exporting rather than dumping it out as UTC.  We have a number of customers that will use SQL export objects to dump out flat files for things like Noms and other processes.  While it's not difficult to convert time in the query to local time, if you live in an area that follows DST it requires manual intervention or logic to alter the offset value.    A checkbox under the Output using UTF-8 box called Enforce Local Time would be super neat.      ... View more

There are  two ways of enabling/disabling a ClearSCADA object: either by setting it in/out of service or by invoking the EnableExecution/DisableExecution method.   It is easy to track out of service logic by querying the InService property. However, there is no corresponding OPC property to easily track if a logic object has its execution disabled but still in service. You can only see it on an individual basis by looking at the Status dialog for a particular logic object.   The best workaround I have found so far is querying the Foreground property and checking if it matches the System Colour for 'Program Disabled' that has been set in the server settings. However, it is pretty clunky and not exactly robust. Being able to query this directly would make it more reliable when trying to search for disabled logic on a SCADA system. ... View more

As per the email exchange with Amy Anger, it would be ideal to have the ability to access bits in the EtherNet/IP analog point tag field as possible in an OPC - Advanced analog point.  This would allow for clients who use DINTs to package information in their systems fully transition to Geo SCADA smoothly.    ... View more

  I want to convert a customer's Allen Bradley PLC points to Ethernet/IP and eliminate the OPC server that is using Ethernet/IP, however they have quite a few PLCs that have DF1 addresses like N16:11/16 and Geo SCADA's driver doe not support those.   In the OPC server's driver that DF1 identifier ends up being 'usable' via CIP because CIP allows for tunneling of other data, so DF1 can be encapsulated within a CIP message.  It's called PCCC. Thanks @BevanWeiss for explaining this to me.   So it would be great if PCCC support was added to the Ethernet/IP driver so more Allen Bradley PLCs can be communicated to directly. ... View more

ClearSCADA / Geo SCADA Expert already has a nice OPC-DA (and OPC-HDA) tunnelling capability through the ClearSCADA / Geo SCADA Expert Data Access Components (and Configure Connections etc). However...   It would be even nicer (in a cross-platform manner) if Geo SCADA Expert was also able to act as a native OPC-UA server (the same way it currently does for OPC-DA etc).  It should align nicely with the existing database structure, and with the security model etc.  So there should be limited complications.   It would allow for additional integration with platforms like Node-RED etc. ... View more

I'd like to see some options like Align left, align right, align top, align bottom when building mimics.    To take it to the max, think of PowerPoint and how when resizing or dragging it'll do some calculations and tell you where the even distance between objects would be and also indicate when resizing when you've reached the border of an object on the same layer.    And for the folks who love to resize things and never make them the same size, multi select --> make same size.  I cannot tell you how much this one triggers me.  Folks will use the same embed, resize them independently and nothing is the same.  Then when they align them, half of them don't snap to the grid because they decided to hold alt when resizing.   Make same size --> align left.    I can't tell you how elated I and many others would be for such a simple thing. ... View more

The geospatial maps are good, but they could be much better.   One such request would be if the icons could be customised so that they aren't just picked from a list of triangle, square, diamond.. and then a circle..   It should be possible to specify any Unicode character, OR an SVG icon to be provided, and this should be possible to animate (as an index into a map icon table object perhaps) via the map query (i.e. so that if a pump is running we can use a certain icon vs if it's not).  ... View more

I think it's time that Geo SCADA Expert got an OPC-UA driver to allow it to retrieve data from OPC-UA servers. ... View more

I've been thinking about sparklines as seen in other software packages and how to recreate them within Geo SCADA without taxing the system.  I can easily mock up an embed that has the last X minutes of data in a sparkline type object, but the issue with a fixed embed becomes "what if the user wants to see 1hr and X ticks in that hour?".  The flexibility, at least in my head, isn't there with a fixed object since it'll have a defined number of ticks.  Maybe I just have to think outside of the box a bit more to get it flexible to handle time and ticks as a parameter.   We can embed a trend with a transparent background, but that's not really a good solution either and would require a trend to be built for pretty much every single point we'd want this on.   Sparklines on a tank or inlet/outlet/critical pressure would be a great addition.  ... View more

Often when making mimics, we want to have something which is coloured and styled the same as an existing Alarm Severity, i.e. we will want a symbol which represents an alarm condition that would be the colour of the High Severity, and would blink like the High Severity, etc etc.   At the moment we have to manually configure items in the database, or have something which automatically retrieves these from an SQL query on the CSeverity table... but this is a bit horrible.   What would be nice is if there was a set of OPC properties related to each of the configured Alarm Severities, perhaps something like a #Severities.{Severity Description}.Foreground... etc for each of the style items. ... View more

Many systems (should) link the appropriate Alarm Points (Low, Low-Low, High, High-High, etc.) operators configure within the HMI/SCADA software (Geo SCADA) to the registers within the controller (PLC).   Example: We have a point with a value between 0-100 High-High: 95 High: 90 Low: 10 Low-Low: 5 These limits would then be linked, bi-directionally, to the appropriate registers in the controller. Modbus in this example. Point.HighLmtStd <> Controller.400100   In the interim we have created a logic script to move the Geo SCADA config values to the created analog output points. This is a single direction and works for "simple" systems, but others with local HMI that allows for these and even some dynamic set point algorithms (avg. deviations...) are not connectable in these manner. The unfortunate reality is that this significantly increases the Point usage. Perhaps give us a "freebie" that can link within the Advanced drivers point config. That would definitely be appreciated! ... View more

It would be really neat to see the OPC server object have a checkbox for something like Block Controls or Ignore Writes.  The use case for this is when there's a production system and a second system (QA or Dev) pointed to the same OPC server.  You can have the OPC server object in QA configured to ignore writes that way all other features continue to function without impeding with production data.  Often times we have customers who want to see values updating in development or QA to replicate load and other things.   We could use server denied permissions and block control, but we still want logic and ST to continue to work so I'm not sure there's a workaround for it. ... View more