DXM Controller with Ignition SCADA

Hi, and welcome to this quick tutorial on how to connect the Banner DXM Gateway series with the Ignition SCADA software.

Today we're going to be covering how to connect the DXMR90 series, but this process will work the same for all other industrial wireless controllers in the DXM series by Banner.

So what we're going to do, I've got my DXM connected directly to my PC, which is acting as the Ignition server.

But as long as the DXM is connected to the same network as the Ignition server on your system, this process would work very much the same.

When we come into Ignition we're on this in this initial screen.

What we're going to do is we're going to go over to 'Config' and we are going to scroll down until we see 'OPC UA' connections and click on 'Device Connections'.

We're going to create a new device.

Go down to 'Modbus TCP', and we are going to utilize that protocol, and then we'll hit 'Next'.

We will give the device a name. In this case, I'm just going to call it the DXMR-90X1.

We can give it a description in the 'Hostname'. I am going to type in the IP address, which is just the default for this particular setup.

We're going to stay on Port 502.

If you have a special network adapter, you'd want to put that information in here, and we can adjust what we want our timeout to be.

There's also a number of advanced properties that you can adjust and play around with.

But in this case we really don't need to adjust any of those for a standard setup.

Go ahead and click 'Create Device', and we can watch the status here go from 'Disconnected' to 'Connected'.

At this point, we're going to go under 'More' in 'Addresses', and this is where we're going to select the data that we're going to want to pull from the DXM's local registers.

Now, the DXM does need to be configured to be having data brought in from sensors, whether they be wireless radios, or directly connected sensors, into those local registers.

But if we already have that data coming into the DXM and we're just wanting to get it into Ignition, this is all that we would have to do.

Now, I'm going to be adding these row by row to pull in some of those different local registers.

But if you had a very long list, you also could import .csv and Ignitions format to be able to build out a much longer list that may save you some time.

I'm going to go ahead and hit 'Add Row'; 'Prefix' is essentially just going to be my tag name.

So I'm going to call this Sensor5 because I'm talking to sensor ID 5 on here.

For our system, we're always going to be setting up with Unit ID 1.

And then for our data coming in, typically most of our stuff is going to be an unsigned integer.

If you have a signed device or you have some signed information, you can pick just standard integer.

So I'm going to pick unsigned integer. You saw there's a number of choices in here.

For the most part, our system is either going to be unsigned 16, or signed 16 here, which is Int16, or Float.

You can - we do - have some floating registers.

Now the Modbus address is going to be that starting Modbus address that we're going to be pulling from.

In the DXM world we've got, you know, 1 through 8000 are our local registers.

And typically you're going to, you would have, for holding registers they would start at 40,000 because Ignition recognizes this as a holding register already it drops the 40,000, as does the DXM.

So Register 1 on the DXM is Register 1 in the Ignition software.

For my particular setup, I am actually going to be looking for data on 'Modbus Address' 21.

Now, the 'Start' and 'End' here, the numbers that go in there, Ignition is going to use to add on to the prefix tag that we already started.

So Sensor 5 and then whatever this number is going to be, I could put in 21 through 25 if I want to collect five registers. And now all the tags are going to be Sensor 5 21, Sensor 5 22, Sensor 5 23, and so on.

But at the same time, I could just put Sensor 5 and I could put a 1 here and I could put a 5.

Really what this system is doing is it's taking the difference between the 'End' and the 'Start', and that is determining how many registers it's going to pull, starting at number 21.

So in reality, I could put 1001 through 1005 and it's going to do the same thing other than the name that's going to - the tag name that's going to get added on to this Sensor 5 at the end.

So just keep it simple. We'll go with 21 through 25.

Go ahead and hit 'Save'.

To do this, you'll see it's disconnected. It goes back to reconnected. And then all we need to do is come down and we can go to the 'OPC Client', click on the 'Quick Client'.

And we can see that if we expand this out and go under 'Devices', there's our device name.

We also have our Unitid 1, can see our tags that were created inside of here.

And these are the five registers that are being pulled.

We can click on each one individually.

I can click 'Read', and I can see the value that's inside of there, and that I get a good quality read.

Or I can click 's', and this 's' is going to try and pull this data in at this rate in a repetitive cycle.

So if I click 's', click 's' again, it can take a little bit for once you do an initial run, but you can see it's reading that first one, and then it will grab the second one, and it will just bring these in in a cyclic fashion.

This is just a test on the on the Quick Client screen.

But once you have data coming in and you're getting good quality, then you can see the values inside of here.

That's when you can move on to the Ignition designer platform and you're ready to go.

Nothing is needed to be done in the DXM to configure it for Modbus TCP as a server. It is always ready as long as it's connected to an Ethernet network. That data can be pulled from it at any time.

At this point, there's nothing else that's needed to be done.

You could go to the Ignition designer, launch the design, the Designer Launcher, and those tags would be in the system and you could go ahead and start building out your Ignition SCADA system.

Thanks for joining this quick tutorial and as always, have a great day.