Hello everyone. This is my first post hope you can help me with this project.

We install seismic Station for monitoring and EEW. Normally we use to CAP message's ( common alert protocol) to send the alert with some values.
Also we have the option to activate a dry contact when the trigger is activated.

My client is asking to send this by OPC to the main system.
Do you know any equipment that can send this alert by OPC using the dry contact?

This is really important issue for this client.

Thank you on advance!
Martín

 

Hello everyone. This is my first post hope you can help me with this project.

We install seismic Station for monitoring and EEW. Normally we use to CAP message's ( common alert protocol) to send the alert with some values.
Also we have the option to activate a dry contact when the trigger is activated.

My client is asking to send this by OPC to the main system.
Do you know any equipment that can send this alert by OPC using the dry contact?

This is really important issue for this client.

Thank you on advance!
Martín

I'm not familiar with seismic stations, so please take these options with a grain of salt.

If your seismic station is a programmable device (single board computer, i.e. a Raspberry Pi), then you may be able to convert your contact signal to OPC directly on the device, i.e., buy employing 3rd party software.

If your seismic station is a closed system, but you are able to connect your dry contact to the GPIO of a single board computer like the Raspberry Pi, then that Raspberry Pi could become the equipment that sends the alert via OPC.

Is your client's OPC software an OPC Server or an OPC client? That determines what kind of OPC software you would need to send the alert. If your client runs an OPC server, would they want to "Reverse Connect" to the OPC client (that is, the OPC server initiates the connection)? That may need consideration when looking at OPC client software.

The other option I can see is that you could send the CAP message to a "normal" CAP server accepting CAP messages. The CAP message receiver can then translate the alerts into OPC or make the alerts available via a more common REST API for other software to perform that translation. The advantage would be that you won't need to touch the seismic device and handle everything else on a system higher up in the chain.

What is suitable will depend very much on your requirements, maybe you could elaborate?

 

I'm not familiar with seismic stations, so please take these options with a grain of salt.

If your seismic station is a programmable device (single board computer, i.e. a Raspberry Pi), then you may be able to convert your contact signal to OPC directly on the device, i.e., buy employing 3rd party software.

If your seismic station is a closed system, but you are able to connect your dry contact to the GPIO of a single board computer like the Raspberry Pi, then that Raspberry Pi could become the equipment that sends the alert via OPC.

Is your client's OPC software an OPC Server or an OPC client? That determines what kind of OPC software you would need to send the alert. If your client runs an OPC server, would they want to "Reverse Connect" to the OPC client (that is, the OPC server initiates the connection)? That may need consideration when looking at OPC client software.

The other option I can see is that you could send the CAP message to a "normal" CAP server accepting CAP messages. The CAP message receiver can then translate the alerts into OPC or make the alerts available via a more common REST API for other software to perform that translation. The advantage would be that you won't need to touch the seismic device and handle everything else on a system higher up in the chain.

What is suitable will depend very much on your requirements, maybe you could elaborate?

Thank you Juergen, very usefull. Any ideas what can be a CAP receiver that then can translate to OPC?

 

Thank you Juergen, very usefull. Any ideas what can be a CAP receiver that then can translate to OPC?

My knowledge is more on the OPC side, I'm afraid. I'm not sure what the usual CAP receiver capabilities are. RSS and Atom feeds seem to be supported by some but I'm not aware of any software that could translate RSS/Atom feeds for OPC (timeliness of alerts is another question). If your seismic device "speaks" other protocols then maybe a different protocol could fit the bill.