Industrial System Arts Inc. News

3070 Mainway Drive, Unit #6

Burlington

Ontario L7M 3X1

Canada

News, Views and Tips

Many programmers of SCADA and HMI systems tend to access PLC / PAC databases by programming the SCADA and HMI database to access various data types such as INTEGER, FLOATING POINT, TIMER and COUNTER Accumulator / Preset, BITS and BIT WORDS as well as STRING Variables.

Performing reads and writes to many data variable types significantly burdens the communication path especially if that path is a Network shared by many devices.

A better solution is to use, were possible, INTEGER words only. Obviously, if STRING values are required then they must be used. However, performing a MOVE from a INTEGER type to another data type will be much more efficient ( this MOVE being performed in the PLC / PAC ).

Contiguous elements within the INTEGER range used is also much more efficient as communication Drivers will handle large amounts of data in one single transmission. Packing BIT elements into INTEGERS is an example of the efficiency gained.

Industrial System Arts Inc. has been in business for 14 years and at our current location for more than 4 years. We continue to provide Engineering & Programming services in all the industries for which we have become known and respected.

Over the last year we provided upgrade services to Levis-Strauss both PLC and HMI and, machine fault diagnosis and correction.

Industrial System Arts Inc. had a reasonably successful 2013. We noticed the economy start to down turn again at the end of last year. Business continues to be slow but, the current winter weather must take some of, if not most of the blame. We will all be glad when this winter is over.