IOLINK Restful interface

[viSci]

Now that we are NI/Emerson I would expect to see more connectivity in the automation sector.  It seems that IOLink is a dominate communications standard that would be a good candidate for support in LabVIEW.

IFM is one company that makes a ton of really cool sensors and networking hubs that are largely IOLink capable.  It should be relatively straightforward to develop a restful IOLink interface using GET/POST with JSON formatted commands.  I am planning on doing this and was wondering if anyone has gone down this path before.

 

https://www.ifm.com/us/en/shared/technologies/io-link/select-products/product-configuration-pages/dataline-tee-cable-wiring

Edited June 10 by viSci

[Jordan Kuehn]

We've done a couple one-off IO-Link implementations, but it was by no means an all-encompassing tool that would work with the general standard. We would pay for a development license, but the deployment license costs from the one LV IOLink toolkit vendor were untenable as we have hundreds of systems. We'd be very interested in something like what you described. Please post updates! Is your intention to open source it or to commercialize it?

[viSci]

The Gpower IOLink toolkit looks great but the cost is prohibitive.  For $1000 I was inclined to give it a go but I would never saddle up to such a cost on a subscription basis and as you said they are also requiring a annual runtime license.  What a disaster that would be for any of my customers when their critical systems stop working on Jan 1st. until they pony up their subscription fees.  I think like you I will just dip my toes in the RESTful JSON waters and then see what it will take to generalize it.

Edited June 11 by viSci

[Steen Schmidt]

I will contact both of you to understand your concerns a bit more, since these toolkits (IO-Link for LabVIEW and TestStand) were developed exactly to accommodate the scenarios you describe. I can clarify a couple of things here as well:

- Our runtime licenses are always perpetual, never a subscription that could expire.
- For development licenses we offer both subscription (to get going for less) and perpetual (if you know you want to use it for a long time). 
- We do offer discounts on license bundles. So if someone has "hundreds of systems", they could use that option.
- The software in question currently has more than 3,000 hours of development time behind it, with ongoing improvements. I assure you, no matter when you begin it will be a long time before you have something that is close to what you could buy today. And at that point you wouldn't consider giving it away for free 🙂. This toolkit parses the entire IODD XML standard, which is huge. It is not quite the same as picking the 2% you need today, and discovering that the next device you want to connect uses a different part of the standard...

Edited June 13 by Steen Schmidt