Hitex, who are the UK’s industrial automation partner for Softing, are providers of the latest networking equipment which will enable you to move forwards into a smart and connected future – with products such as OPC UA and configurable gateways, we are able to keep the data flowing seamlessly across your industrial environment.
We provide a wide range of tools for both PROFIBUS and PROFINET industrial networks. From the latest in PROFIBUS Testers through to OPC toolkits we are able to keep your operation running smoothly on a 24/7 basis. As an example, our hand-held testers give immediate insight into your network straight out of the box to get problems pinpointed and solved as fast as possible, while the OPC toolkits can deliver you the ability to connect directly from PROFINET to PROFIBUS PA with the new PNgatePA, or even add Ethernet to your older S5 or S7 PLCs.
With the IIoT and Industry 4.0 becoming ever more important, we can also enable you to connect your factory not only to itself, but also to other sites and offices across your organisation. We have products that can help you achieve compliance to this operating standard with the least effort possible.
Whether you need to enable a variety of legacy network flavours to communicate seamlessly, or be able to analyse the data coming off the factory floor to predict and prevent downtime and adapt to peaks and troughs in demand – we can help.
As the Industry 4.0 summit draws nearer, we are delighted to be able to share the news of 3 exciting new innovations from Softing on the stand, specifically for the IIoT and Industry 4.0 compliance:
Major enhancements to the dataFEED OPC Suite.
The dataFEED OPC Suite has been enhanced with 3 major new improvements:
- Support for optimised block access for Siemens controllers
- Support for the Siemens S7-2 protocol, which enables symbol information to be read directly from the controller.
- The dataFEED Exporter can now be used for the direct export of symbols from a Siemens TIA Portal V14 project and the subsequent import of them into the OPC Suite.
Extended support for the echocollect gateway to include MQTT.
Echocollect now supports the MQTT protocol, making the integration of process data from system and machinery into cloud solutions more straightforward and reliable. Alongside OPC UA and other control protocols, the new version 7.10 firmware for the echocollect gateway includes publisher functionality from the MQTT (Message Queue Telemetry Transport) protocol.
This also makes the echocollect gateway suitable for process data integration in larger-scale systems.
Brand new OPC UA embedded toolkit for the development of OPC UA servers on embedded systems.
Softing’s OPC UA embedded toolkit is based on the ANSI C standard and features a low memory footprint as well as minimal requirements for computing power. This makes it particularly suitable not just in firmware development for sensors and field devices but also for use in control or I/O systems with limited resources. Users benefit from the utilization of predesigned and tested toolkit functions and can use these to significantly shorten the time-to-market of their development projects. The toolkit supports the OPC Foundation’s Nano Embedded Device Server Profile security features and publisher functionality from the UA v1.04 (release candidate) specification. Support is also available for developing service functionality for client/server communication.
All these products have been specifically improved and designed with connectivity in mind – they truly will enable the joining up of the dots across your entire network.
To find out more about these exciting developments in much greater detail, be sure to come and visit the Hitex (UK) Ltd on stand R30 to see how we can help you join up the dots on your industrial network.
