FeSCADA

FeSCADA is a Windows based program that can be used for machine/process visualization. It can display indicators with digital or analog data, from user defined tags. It can change tags data with buttons, sliders or numerical data entry controls. The tags values are linked with other tags from different DDE servers (RSLinx, Excel, MB, etc). The main features of the program are described bellow.

Tags are the central part of the program. The user will define the tags first. A tag can be: integer, float or string. The integer and float tags can be scaled for engineering units. Any scaled tag will become a floating point value. Once defined, the tags can be linked to anyone of maximum 20 different DDE servers, with the format: DDE_Application | DDE_Topic | DDE_TagName. The program will exchange windows messages to read/write tag values from/to these DDE servers. There is no program limit for the number of tags that can be defined by the user.

For the data recording of the tags values, FeSCADA offers four types of destinations: text file, CSV file, any database for which an ODBC driver is installed on your computer, and Microsoft Access database. The data can be updated or appended. The files/tables can be rewritten, created as unique names, with new names which will include the date/time in the file/table name, or the data can be added at the end of the file/table without deleting the old one. By using the special characters %Y, %M, %D, %H, %m in the name of the file/table, new files/tables will be created as soon as the date/time from the real time clock of the computer is changing: the year, the month, the day of the month, the hour, or the minute. The recording trigger options are covering the following options: timer only, timer & tag value, tag value change, and date/time.

FeSCADA program can send simple or secure emails. Every email can be sent to up to 5 recipients. The trigger types are: timer only, timer and tag value, tag value change and date/time. Tags can be inserted in the email's body text. They will be replaced with their values at the moment of email transmission.

Recipes are useful in automation. A recipe is a set of data in a matrix like table, with columns and lines. The data from any line can be loaded in selected application tags with the aid of an index tag and a command tag. After a recipe is loaded, an acknowledge value is displayed in a status tag.

Timers are useful tools in many real life automation situations. Three type of timers can be used in FeSCADA: non-cyclic, cyclic and time/date. The trigger conditions are based on either arithmetic relations of a trigger tag with a constant number, defined by the user, or by checking a bit number for 0 or 1, in an integer tag. The output of the timers is an application tag selected by the user. Any value can be defined to be loaded in the output tag for the On and Off states. The values TOn and TOff are loaded in the output tag only in the moments of transition: Off -> On and On -> Off.

Ramps are of two types: time based and input variable based. To define a time based ramp select and edit the number of steps with times and values. To control the ramp select the command and status tags from the application's tags. The variable based ramps are defined as number of pairs of values (x,y). In this type of ramps, linear or spline interpolation can be used.

With FeSCADA software it is possible to setup and run PID controllers. Tags are used for Command and Status of a PID. Scaling is applied for input and output tags. The output of the PID can be used with one or two tags, analog or digital. Digital tags use pulse width modulation (PWM). The PIDs can be run in manual and automatic mode. Two empirical methods for PID tuning are available in FeSCADA: the step response and the frequency response.

The user can setup, monitor and record alarms events. An alarm is linked with a tag's discrete bit number or value. Bit level check or mathematical comparisons are used to evaluate if an alarm is active (On) or not active (Off). A code, a priority and a text message are associated with any alarm. Alarms are recorded on the local computer and optionally in a database, defined by the user.

With this feature the user can setup and run logic programs. The programs can be run continuously, at special time/dates, or as a logic comparison result of a trigger tag value with a constant. Tags can be used in any logic expression, at the bit level or value level, and the result of complex expressions can be assigned to any numeric tag.

The user can create and edit her/his own screens. Every screen has a title and a window where the user can add visual controls like: digital/analog indicators, buttons, numeric/string displays, sliders, trend charts, and navigation buttons to go to another screen. All these visual indicators can be linked with specific tags and will operate with the values of those tags, either to display or/and to change them.