Version Dog

[Tim_S]

Our IT department is rolling out a SCC package called Version Dog to our site. Looking a the website, it looks to be geared for PLCs but down in the documentation it mentions LabVIEW. Has anyone heard of this before? Used it? Have opinions on it? Not impressed by the amount of openly available non-fluff information on the website.

We do have a SVN server running, however the network changes from when the current owners took over have FUBAR our ability to connect to SVN from our desk. This appears to be a much needed effort to version control the PLC programs (long overdue) and an attempt to close out IT work tickets that are many years old.

Thanks in advance for any replies.

[Michael Aivaliotis]

Never heard of it. Seems like a proprietary system. So you guys have a lot of PLC code?

[Tim_S]

15 hours ago, Michael Aivaliotis said:

Never heard of it. Seems like a proprietary system. So you guys have a lot of PLC code?

Yea, the lack of information and the lack of recognition are getting my attention.

Our systems have a plethora of drives, pneumatics, hydraulics... lots of motion control and contiguous fault monitoring. Lots of assembly stations where a small PLC works fine (or a larger one running a bunch of stations). The plants we put systems in have plenty of maintenance people who can deal with PLCs and they are comfortable with them. The test stations we put in are often the most advanced piece of hardware they have in the plant.

[Michael Aivaliotis]

So is what percentage of the overall code is LabVIEW and how many active LabVIEW developers do you have?

[Tim_S]

17 hours ago, Michael Aivaliotis said:

So is what percentage of the overall code is LabVIEW and how many active LabVIEW developers do you have?

That depends on the project. Some projects are full assembly lines where the conveyor, assembly and gauging stations are controlled by PLCs and the more advanced testing is done by PLC motion control and PC performing supervisory test control, data collection and analysis, etc. Small single test stations may only have a PC running the entire show (including motion control). There might be 100% LabVIEW or 100% PLC depending on the project (particularly since we may include other companys' software instead of our LabVIEW-based solution at customer requirement).

Our original LabVIEW application was written back in LabVIEW 2 when having the PLC do the bulk of things and the PC providing direction and acquiring/analyzing was pushing what could be done (this was also back in the days where you had to make your own custom cards as there just wasn't an off-the-shelf anything). We were still using a decedent of that software when I came on board (including a lot of things you had to do in LabVIEW 2 just to get things to work). That software is long mothballed and we're on version 4.2 of the current software, which is a set of distributed applications (security, data acquisition, error display, calibration, sequencing...) that communicate through TCP and shared variables. Our thought is to migrate the test itself out of the Windows PC into a real-time operating system and use the Windows PC for HMI and mid-term storage. We were able to get as far as we have with this because of posts people made on LavaG that we learned from and were able to get a lot of help from people here. (NI tech support is great, but I had to spend a lot of time explaining the concept of a plugin to them from LabVIEW 8.0 to LabVIEW 2012).