Accessing your plant-floor data is easy, and has been for quite some time. However, some times the information you need is not actually the raw-data itself, but information derived from the raw data, perhaps some aggregated values, or simply the sum of a number of raw-values.

Many HMI/SCADA systems provide end-users with the ability to define different types of Tags:

• Actual I/O (accessing device-memory etc.)
• Calculated tags

Calculated tags beyond your basic scaling in the HMI/SCADA system typically require some kind of coding (depending upon your HMI), whether it was VBScript or some proprietary language, ultimately though, somebody was most likely coding the math, which means someone has to maintain that custom scripting.

Some Logging or Historian systems don’t have the ability to provide calculated tags. If you needed to store anything other than the raw or scaled values you had to do it through the HMI/SCADA system or use some other method to calculate and store values. 

Times have changed… with the Advanced Tags feature of the TOP Server anybody can now define calculation tags very quickly, and with minimal effort, and with no coding.

In this article, we look at this powerful feature of the TOP Server with step-by-step instructions for creating calculated and aggregated tags.

Because the TOP Server has so many drivers, you can connect many different systems and take advantage of the Advanced Tags. Once you license and install the Advanced Tags feature, it is available to ANY driver in TOP Server that you already own the license for.

Since any tag in the TOP Server can be used you can combine values from different PLC’s to return resulting values. Using the TOP Server  OPC DA Client Driver or DDE Client driver you can also pull values from other I/O Servers into the TOP Server, so you can integrate all your systems together. 

Ready to add Advanced Tags to your TOP Server? Order your plug-in license here 

Questions?  Call us on 888-665-3678 (US Toll Free) or +1 704 849 2773, or submit your question online at http://support.softwaretoolbox.com