Search the Community

Hi, My company has a software/hardware product which is deployed as a labview executable. The software is of the SCADA type and it typically monitors and controls 5-20 machines using modbus. We also log data from each machine (every ten minutes, 10-20 data points per machine). The gui allows the operator to trend data in 24 hour increments by selecting the machines and day of the year. We have been using DSC and Citadel to store the data as traces which allows us to locate the data with a start and stop time for display. However, my company is not happy about the licensing of DSC and has asked me to look into other options. Part of the issue with DSC is that although it is supported by NI, it is no longer being developed, fixed or improved. An example of this is the DSC modbus IO servers which map to shared variables. There are known issues with how certain write functions are implemented which make it impossible to write to many modbus devices. NI has acknowledged the problem but is not going to fix it. So we have developed our own modbus routines, making use of the NI modbus library. On the data logging and trending side, I would like to know if there are reasonable alternatives within the labview environment that don't require a DSC license on each deployed machine? I know that citadel uses TDMS and it seems like a great format, but I'm not sure if it would be too much work to build out code for logging and retrieving time series data using the low level functions that labview provides. As you can probably tell, i'm familiar with labview but don't have a lot of background in databases and data management. Does anyone have experience trying something similar? Thanks