The Mirror Controls international facility in Manorhamilton, Ireland, recently upgraded their automation system with the OPC DataHub. The engineering team found the OPC DataHub to be a simple drop-in replacement for a buggy Excel plug-in.

"Setting this up was as simple as attaching the OPC DataHub to the OPC server and dragging the data points into Excel," said Paraic McDonagh, a project spokesman. "And by replacing the troublesome Excel plug-in with the OPC DataHub we were able to simplify the SCADA system into a single workbook.

"What's more, since the OPCDataHub can be run as a service, our operator now only needs to open a workbook to have the entire system up and running."

Cogent announces a new sales partnership with Logicpark, a Swiss computer science and engineering firm specializing in connecting industrial applications with management and IT systems. Logicpark will market the OPC DataHub in Switzerland, Germany, Austria, and other parts of Europe.

"In all our years of experience with OPC integration, we find the OPC DataHub to be the best solution available," said Bruno Maurer, Solutions Leader for Logicpark. "It combines many capabilities in a single program and is much easier to configure than other popular products on the European market."

Question: I need to combine data from a .csv file with my live process data, and write it to an OPC client application. Is this possible with the OPC DataHub?

Answer: Yes, it is. There is a DataHub script called ReadCSV.g that reads a .csv file containing names and values and writes them to the OPC DataHub. You can download this script and learn how to use it at the Cogent Forum.