It has never been easier to see the flexibility of the OPC DataHub. Just pull out your web-enabled cell phone or PDA, go to this page on our website, and type in one of the URLs shown there.

As long as your phone or PDA supports AJAX, you should be able to see live data in the display. If not, most likely you can still view the ASP page. Once a page is displayed, you can enter data to interact with the system, and see the results in your desktop web browser.

For the past several years, students and faculty at the Vehicle Dynamics Lab (VDL) of the University of California, Berkeley, have been using the Cascade DataHub (a QNX version) to coordinate distributed control, image processing, and communications among a group of unmanned aircraft.

"The DataHub has contributed a great deal to our software integration," said Brandon Basso, one of the VDL team members. "It helps avoids many of the difficulties associated with multi-process management."

A manufacturing company is using the OPC DataHub to write end-of-day statistics into an MS-Access database. A DataHub script is used to write production values to various tables in the Access database.

The script is scheduled to run in the middle of the night to avoid conflicts with other database users. Management personnel can now open the Access database and see up-to-date reports based on the previous nights totals.