Got it working - Allen-Bradley PLC to Outsystems comms

Jason Herrington

Question

All,

Not so much a question but wanted to post a solution we finally got working with alot of support from the Outssytems tech support (Stacey, Pedro, Isaac, Rui - You Rock!) and from João Rosado!

So the activity we wanted to accomplish was to get bidirectional communications from an Allen-Bradley PLC to the Outsystems server.

Method used to accomplish it:
- I found a C# library that would allow communications between the PC the PLC for $250. This is mainly so I don't have to delve down to socket level connections and figure out the driver between teh two.
- Created a C# WCF service which was then made into a windows service on the PC
- Consumed this service on the Outsystems platform. Now the problem with this was that it allowed me to initiate communications between the Outsystems server to the PLC but unless I wanted to wait minutes for a timer inside Outsystems to cycle I could not immediately initiate actions inside Outsystems based on a state change inside the PLC. So:
- In the windows service it scans the PLC once a second and looks for values in tags that I am using to pass data (such as a door proximity card read) from the PLC to the Outsystems server. If it does see a value in one of those tags, it calls a web service I created in Outsystems which in the methods for it, I can have it do whatever I want as soon as that data is passed in even if noone has a website open.

Seems to work very well. Will be testing it in a more "live" environment as soon as I get a few more things working.

16 Oct 2014

João Rosado

Staff

Good work Jason! Nice to know you got it working as you needed.

Regards,
João Rosado

16 Oct 2014

MVP

Cool!

17 Oct 2014

Matt Yeager

Nice job, Jason. I'm not surprised to see your name on a PLC post!

24 Oct 2014

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