It's a loaded question to be sure. But we have had to consider similar things in the past before as well. Here would be my feedback:
We use Intouch for production equipment HMIs. This is mainly due to the ease of rapid prototyping and the enhanced graphical capabilities that are needed. We find that LabVIEW is sorely lacking in this department - our HMIs are intended to be operated with minimal training and be accessible to the "swipe" generation.
For test equipment with specialist hardware we often have a TestStand or LabVIEW back-end that does a lot of the hardware interfacing. For other automation equipment we often revert back to cheap but effective PLCs.
The ability to do complex animation effects, window management and scripting is typically built-in and intuitive in most SCADA systems. It's what they are there for after all.
Most SCADA HMIs (Intouch included) support ModbusTCP. This is a very common communication protocol and is often "built-in"..
We have implemented much more complex systems than this in Intouch previously.
SCADA systems typically require purchasing a development license and then a run-time license on each machine running the deployed HMI. You should factor this cost into your solution chart when making the decision. You can always contact a local representative in your country to determine the expected costs.
Do not forget the cost of engineering time. This is difficult to gauge in your case but the fact that you are already familiar with LabVIEW is a strong tick in that column.
SCADA systems are not as typically good at performing test sequencing (their primary function is data collection, display and logging hence the name). In your case the infrastructure needed is not great so it is quite possible to implement what you are proposing in such a system and we have done so many times before. However I suspect that familiarity will be the biggest deciding factor for you. I would encourage you to explore the SCADA option if only for future endeavors where your requirements are different.
Thanks Omar. Further investigation seems to indicate that pulling network licenses is what is causing the issue. Oh well, running the agent as an application will work for now.
I see a fix there for template instantiation, nice! I'll check it out. I confess I had actually lost a little faith and ended up building my own unit test framework with some similarities to VI Tester (ie based on xUnit) solely so that we could run on 2012+ and get the benefits of a leaner framework for CI rather than NI's UTF. But I would always rather use a tried and tested tool. Just an FYI this is the sort of tool we would happily pay money for!
