Prerequisite

● A Braincube IoT Server
● The application OPC DA/HDA install (see appsmanager)
● An OPC DA/HDA server protocol available and working
● A Windows machine with version Windows 8/Windows Server 2016 and ulterior

The node settings

1) Basic infrastructure

First of all, check where your OPC DA Server is allocated.
If the OPC DA Server is installed in the same machine of the wrapper agent, it will have a COM connection.
Otherwise, if the OPC DA Server is installed in a remote machine, it will have a DCOM connection.

Pay attention to your COM/DCOM configurations. It will be essential for a good connection.

2) Download the OPC DA/HDA node from Apps Manager

Once the application OPC DA/HDA installed you will find new nodes in your node palette:

The OPCDA_in is designed to help you read data from an OPC DA Server.
You can easily drag and drop this node from the palette to your dataflow and start working with it. The first thing to do is to set up the node:
Download the Wrapper Agent

Double click on the node and choose “Add new wrapper” in “Wrapper List” for new installation.

Then, download the installation file

3) Install the Wrapper Agent (as administrator)

4) Connect the Wrapper Agent

5) Configure the OPC Server

Fill the parameters of the OPC Server.
Type in “Apply” then “Update”

6) Finish the node configuration

7) Configure the tag list

HDA node options

When you install the application OPC DA/HDA you will also have an option to extract data using OPC HDA, standing for Historical Data Access. This will be done using another node, the OPC HDA node. It is quite the same configuration except that you will be able to specify a timeframe you want to extract using a function node:

In the OPC HDA node you will find two way to extract data:

• Standard: All data points will be extracted as is.
• Processed: You can chose how to extract your data, how to aggregate it. For example if your sensors transmit one point every seconds but you want only one point per minute you can select Processed > End > *60000

Example

You can find an example of how we implement an OPC DA Server extraction just below:

This flow is composed of :

inject: this node trigger the extraction, we chose to set up this node in "interval mode" to trigger the extraction automatically every XX secondes

OPCDA_in: this node is the one we worked on during this article, it connects to an OPCDA Server and extract some data

Change node: this node is only for put at the payload the timestamp

braincubeTransfert: this node upload data to your Braincube Environment

Multiple Extraction configuration

Each extraction is viewed as a unique association like <configuration , taglist> .

Therefore , in order to extract multiple set of tags from different nodes containing a different taglist you must:

• add new OPC configuration in the wrapper even if the configuraiton is identical.

Here below we would like to setup 2 extractions for different set of taggroup:

We therefore need to make 2 configuration of OPC DA (even if it reaches the same server).

-OPC server 1

-OPC Server 2

Again the taglists in each node are not the same.

-Tag list of group1

-Tag list of group2