Anyone else here using Ignition at their facility?
I’m blown away by it. I started using it to build an MES, and quickly it’s replacing our SCADA as well. Blows Rockwell out of the water.
And the cost structure is so good. I’m doing all the development in the trial for free, and don’t plan to use any capital until it’s actively being used by the operators and we’ve ironed out the bugs.
Best part is I’ve been able to make a working MES without any Python background due to the extensive resources available.
I swear I’m not a shill for them, just really impressed by their product… it could seriously use a shape tool though.
I used it 10 years ago in an industrial setting for scada style HMIs that needed to interconnect with many control systems. I should download a copy to trial because it was neat.
Looks like a pretty cool platform. I am curious as to the pricing that you coming to with everything you need. Did you build any custom modules? Or are you able to get away with a pretty standard platform?
I have been doing a lot of SCADA style retrofits… I have been utilizing MQTT for telemetry, and dropping in microcontrollers when needed. I have done work on modbus, CANbus, and BACnet. I’ve created a few unified distributed systems as well, and I was able to add some pretty fancy and affordable sensors to the SCADA systems that would have otherwise been impossible or to costly like FLIR Leptons, edge compute and high speed image scanners.
I’ve looked at it and played with the trial a tiny bit, never been able to justify the price of admission.
If you are doing a full MES, by the time you tick all of the boxes for a full installation, it gets to be very spendy, IMO. I seem to remember a six figure estimate by the time I was at the last page of the sepasoft estimator.
Way less than Rockwell, sure. But Rockwell is just coasting on their vendor locked customer base, and they charge more for “someone will pick up a phone” level support than I got paid last year.
It’s a framework. Does it work? Sure. Does it speed some things up? Sure.
I’d rather build from first principles, myself, because that gives more flexibility. Especially now that Codesys lets you script the creation and modification of visualizations since visu 4.7.
If I were working as an SI or if I’d inherited a site with a bunch of legacy stuff I wanted to connect together, ignition could make a lot of sense.
You absolutely don’t need Sepasoft, depending on where your priorities are. And everything Sepasoft does can be done in regular Ignition, Sepasoft just makes it quicker to roll out some features.
Even if you’re building out a ‘Full MES’, generally the best approach is to split things up into smaller projects, and go after the highest priorities first
For me I’m focused on product tracking first, trace of ingredients matters less. If i needed stronger trace features, maybe I’d consider Sepasoft. But for product tracking, downtime, a digital andon, and some QMS elements I’ve been able to accomplish everything with the basic platform.
Perspective unlimited is somewhere around $25K. Easy to justify, at least for my capital budget.
I do have a big mix of PLCs, but to be honest even if I was all Allen Bradley I’d still prefer Ignition.
If I was doing more IIOT or MQTT stuff I’d probably pay for the extra features, but for an MES and SCADA Perspective unlimmited is more than enough.
We’re lucky that everything is 100% in house and all Codesys for everything that’s got any sort of smarts to it.
And our process control library is also 100% in house so all of the objects already hold/provide all of the data we want.
As with so many other things, we’re in a bit of a weird spot where a lot of the things that are out there aren’t good fits for what we’re trying to do.
To me using windmill and UMH seems like a much better spend of resources to get where we want to be on the MES front.