Hello, not sure if this is the right place, but here goes. I’m currently involved in automating a wastewater treatment process using a PLC. I’m in need of a SCADA system to control equipment, visualize data, and monitor each step of the process.
I received a recommendation for a Windows-compatible SCADA, but I’m not a fan of Windows due to its slow performance on industrial computers. Are there any free Linux-friendly alternatives or solutions to achieve the same functionality? Any insights would be greatly appreciated.
Please don’t take the following as me being a dick, I am just genuinely curious. Your response is unique and interesting to me.
Then why did you feel compelled to respond?
The rest of the thread is filled with people who know the topic and gave relevant responses very specific to OP’s situation. Many hours before your response in fact. I’m a little perplexed.
Any person (with enough budget) could get software built, but that’s obvious to anyone, so it’s kind of redundant to suggest, so why write it given the other responses? I am further perplexed.
I take this as humor. OP was looking for software to run on Linux, not a Linux distro. Was that the joke?
Anyway, I’m sorry if I have come across as critical or insulting. I really am just curious. If I have, and it’s any consolation, if you care to genuinely answer my questions, I’ll give you a short explanation of what OP was on about, if that is helpful to you. I think it was very kind of you to respond to OP, I think I’m just confused more than anything.
I though my response was amusing. At least it was amusing for me.
Thanks for your response. Sorry I didn’t get the joke.
As promised, here’s a “simple” explanation of SCADA, or as simple as I can make it at least. It will probably be rudimentary enough to be controversial, and long enough to be boring. Oh well.
It stands for supervisory control and data acquisition, and if you think that’s a weird mouthful, it’s because it’s old and comes from a time when clicking graphics on a screen was a novel idea, and logging swaths of data with a computer and searching within it and rendering graphs from it was cutting edge. The term is basically relegated to plant, industrial and manufacturing type processes where a bunch of engineering has gone into it. Processes like brewing, water treatment, factories, assembly lines, etc.
Those processes are automated with special computers called PLCs that are basically “robot brains” that control things like (but not limited to) motors, valves, pumps, conveyers, robot arms, all kinds of stuff to manipulate the physical world, and can receive information from sensors like (but not limited to) pressure, speed, flow, weight, on/off, open/closed, temperature, distance, or anything else that someone has built a physical world sensor for. You can put all that stuff together with a program in the PLC and automate practically anything from beer making to zebra counting.
And that’s all well and good, but if you want to see what the process is doing (supervise it), or stop it if it’s gone off the rails (control), or see what it did last time (data acquisition), you need SCADA. There’s special software to build a SCADA system with, and it’s mostly special because it needs to talk to the myriads of PLC (and related) gear out there, and until relatively recently, it’s been tied to an ancient Windows technology called OLE, meaning if you wanted SCADA in your industrial process, you had to suffer with the rather unindustrial wart of Windows in the middle of it. OP is seeking the industrial Holy Grail of a windowsless process in their plant.
We take it for granted today that we can build an interface in a web browser, and hook it up to control a USB device, all in one day, but 40+ years ago there was Windows 3, serial devices, and no commonly established way to communicate with gear (which OLE kinda solved), or standard design of how interfaces should look or work. Ignition brings all of that old shit into the modern world.
A relatable example you could call “baby SCADA” would be a smart thermostat, if it has an onboard temperature trend graph. The process it controls is your automated home heating and cooling. The smart thermostat can tell you if the AC is running, you can change the target setting that you want the room temperature to go to. And if it has a graph of the temperature for the last 24 hours so you can see that the schedule you set worked, then it’s basically a 'lil SCADA.
Cheers.
Nice explanation, I honestly want to try to build one now. I’ve actually done something very similar in Minetest but I’m pretty sure that doesn’t count.
Bro! Download Ignition, it’s free, do all of the free courses, get the certification (also free I think), put it on your resume/CV and get yourself a job in automation! It’s in demand.
IMO It’s cool as hell to control machines as big as a room with a click of a button on an interface you built with your own two hands, lemme tell ya.