The OPC DataHub is the first OPC-to-Excel product capable of feeding OPC timestamps, quality, and type, as well as data values, into an Excel spreadsheet in real time. Unlike other products that offer only data values, the OPC DataHub's unique technology now provides all the information that any regular OPC client receives, live in Excel.

"There are other products on the market that claim the ability to connect OPC to Excel," said Andrew Thomas, President of Cogent. "But they only write the value, so you only get part of the picture. The commonly-used properties of OPC are value, timestamp, quality and type. Most OPC clients receive all of these, and now the OPC DataHub puts all of them into Excel."

Recently the management at the Total Exploration and Production (Total E&P) in Aberdeen, Scotland chose the OPC DataHub to connect their terminal system to their corporate networks, to gain access to valuable production data in real time.

They tested several OPC tunnelling products, and chose the OPC DataHub because of its ease of use, reliability, and extra features. “The OPC DataHub is a powerful tool,” said Rob Sidebottom, project leader. “Quick and robust, it’s just what we wanted.”

Since the OPC DataHub can act as a server or client for OPC, TCP, and DDE, you can use it to easily convert data protocols. Just connect a server and client using any of these protocols to the OPC DataHub. To share data between two servers, you can use the convenient Bridging interface. Either way, each connected participant sends and receives data according to its own protocol.

Here are a few examples of the possibilities:

• Connect OPC DA2 clients and servers to OPC DA3 clients and servers
• Convert DDE messages into OPC and TCP messages
• Connect custom TCP programs to OPC and DDE enabled programs