R
What we currently have:
- A historian with an OPC HDA server on top.
The historian allows us to do calculations (on history data) but these need to be configured in the historian. The standard trending tool allows the users to do ad-hoc calculations (just put a formula where otherwise a tag is entered) but this desktop tool is to expensive to be installed on every PC. Further we would have to have every user to connect directly to the historian and I would like to keep this door closed.
- A web based trending tool to get the history data to the users.
A problem some of our users have is to do ad-hoc calculations on historized data. This enables what-if studies based on history data.
- An Excel add-in to get the history data in Excel
Currently our users use this to do ad-hoc calculations but the MS-chart component has a lot of missing functionality for our users. They typically complain about:
-- having only one vertical axis so all data needs to be scaled and normalized first,
-- having only one horizontal (time axis),
-- having no easy way to zoom in on the data and
-- lack of a hairline cursor.
So, I'm looking for a tool that can either use data out of Excel and show a decent trend with features described above or a tool that allows us to do ad-hoc calculations directly on history data and show the results in a trend. In the latter case we don’t want to open up the OPC HDA server connection for the whole plant so the ideal would be to have something that connects to a different server.
In any case it is the end user who has to be able to create the calculations so the calculations should not have to be configured on a server (we already have that). Also, when the user is done looking at the data he will probably never need the calculations again so there is no need to have an engine that stores (and keeps storing) the calculation results.
The way I see it the tool would have to fetch all history data needed to do the calculations, perform the calculations point per point and show the results in the trend.
Pointers to good (and reasonably priced - open source ?) tools and pointers to libraries that can be used to create such tools are very welcome.
- A historian with an OPC HDA server on top.
The historian allows us to do calculations (on history data) but these need to be configured in the historian. The standard trending tool allows the users to do ad-hoc calculations (just put a formula where otherwise a tag is entered) but this desktop tool is to expensive to be installed on every PC. Further we would have to have every user to connect directly to the historian and I would like to keep this door closed.
- A web based trending tool to get the history data to the users.
A problem some of our users have is to do ad-hoc calculations on historized data. This enables what-if studies based on history data.
- An Excel add-in to get the history data in Excel
Currently our users use this to do ad-hoc calculations but the MS-chart component has a lot of missing functionality for our users. They typically complain about:
-- having only one vertical axis so all data needs to be scaled and normalized first,
-- having only one horizontal (time axis),
-- having no easy way to zoom in on the data and
-- lack of a hairline cursor.
So, I'm looking for a tool that can either use data out of Excel and show a decent trend with features described above or a tool that allows us to do ad-hoc calculations directly on history data and show the results in a trend. In the latter case we don’t want to open up the OPC HDA server connection for the whole plant so the ideal would be to have something that connects to a different server.
In any case it is the end user who has to be able to create the calculations so the calculations should not have to be configured on a server (we already have that). Also, when the user is done looking at the data he will probably never need the calculations again so there is no need to have an engine that stores (and keeps storing) the calculation results.
The way I see it the tool would have to fetch all history data needed to do the calculations, perform the calculations point per point and show the results in the trend.
Pointers to good (and reasonably priced - open source ?) tools and pointers to libraries that can be used to create such tools are very welcome.