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ICC 2019 is in full swing in Folsom, CA. The Ignition Community Conference brings together the entire Inductive Automation ecosystem of integrators, third-party suppliers, and the entire Inductive staff including executives, developers, sales, marketing, support and more. Ten Vertech team members representing all three of our offices are attending. Here are a few impressions and comments from the team.

Have you ever looked at your SCADA screen(s) and thought this screen could look a lot better? Or why isn’t there organization or functionality to this screen design? Maybe you haven’t, but we guarantee your operators have. The problem with some SCADA designs is programmers don’t take the time to think about the daily usage. The goal for any screen design should be to help the operator receive important information efficiently in order to make decisions.

In my last post, I gave tips on the various tools available for finding and logging issues both within your application and with Inductive Automation’s Ignition SCADA software. In this post, we’ll dive into three additional debugging and diagnostics tools in Ignition: Execution, Threads, and Gateway scripts.

Inductive Automation’s Ignition platform is a powerful, flexible, and highly customizable SCADA platform enabling data-driven decision making for industrial enterprises. Before the final product hits the plant floor, however, developers must configure and program the platform. This post provides a few tips on the different tools available for troubleshooting issues both within your application and with the Ignition software.

For 30 years, Weber Metals has been a major supplier of aluminum and titanium forgings within the aerospace industry. Having such a large operation makes collecting real-time, accurate data imperative to operations. To help Weber Metals achieve this, Vertech integrated all existing PLCs to a supervisory PLC and SCADA software that provided central trending and the ability to report actionable data for the entire site.

Now is the time for water utilities and municipalities to get serious about their network security. Cyber attacks are the top threat to critical infrastructure in the United States. In an effort to secure our nation’s critical infrastructure, the United States government passed the Water Infrastructure Act of 2018. This act mandates every community water system serving 3,300+ people to assess their network for risk and prove the resilience of their system in protecting against cyber threats and the deadlines are approaching.

In the oil and gas industry, data collection occurs across many devices which can be miles apart. With such a large geographical area, receiving real time data and alerts is imperative. Collecting data from geographically distributed assets is challenging, but well fields that have been built out over years pose additional challenges to data collection with control systems from different manufacturers and eras. This case study looks at the development of an enterprise SCADA system using Ignition 8.0 and the Perspective module to centralize data from well-field assets.

Unit testing has long been the standard practice in the world of software development and it’s easy to see why.  Unit testing is the practice where individual ‘Units’ of code are tested to make sure they act as suspected.  With the ever-evolving world of software and constant updates being made to most software products it is more important than ever to be able to test specific ‘Units’ of the code to make sure that recent updates did not have adverse effects on other portions of the code.

The industrial automation industry is behind the times.

Every year more and more people are abandoning traditional computing for more convenient and user-friendly options. We at Vertech understand that and we want to give operators a sense of pride and accomplishment and managers the customization options to best help their productivity.

The industrial automation industry is behind the times- but not for long. Vertech is proud to announce Vertech Freemium™ a new SCADA for the modern world.

Inductive Automation’s long-anticipated Ignition 8 is slated to be released in the upcoming weeks. One of its many awesome new features is the introduction of the Perspective module which creates a seamless browser-based user experience using HTML5. This new front end allows for responsive screen design that will adjust automatically to a monitor, tablet, or a mobile screen as needed.