Access EPIC IO from Ignition

groov EPIC
1

Hi,

Is it possible to access any IO from Ignition?

I didn’t find any solution other than using OPC with a Codesys program.

Thanks,

2

Hi there! Firstly, if you are using Codesys, using an OPC UA connection - here’s a great post on how to expose your Codesys tags over OPC - Codesys Tags into Groov View. I suppose if you needed another way to get data out of Codesys, you could expose tags via Modbus or another Industrial Protocol using Codesys various modules for communication.

If you are using PAC Control on your EPIC, you can check out the Cirrus Link Opto 22 groov EPIC SNAP PAC Driver from Ignition.

Another option would be to use the MQTT client on EPIC (either the native one or MQTT Transmission in Ignition Edge) to pump that data into the Ignition MQTT Distributor module.

Does that all make sense?

3

You can also directly use modbus to the IO unit without Codesys or PAC Control.

Groov manage has a handy tool to look up the modbus address (0-based). Go to IO, click on Tools, then click on MMP Calculator. From there you can select the memory map area to read (such as analog channel write - which you can read too), select the slot and channel of the IO point and it will give you the modbus unit id (slave id) and address to use in Ignition.

Note that the default TCP port for modbus is 8502 on EPIC. When setting up the EPIC in the Ignition Gateway, click advanced and check the zero-based addressing option since the tool gives zero-based addresses.

When you define the OPC tag in Ignition, you would set it up like this [Gateway Device Name]23.HRF4192 as the OPC path. In that example, that would get the value at module 2, channel 3 of an analog module. The 23 is the unit ID, the 4192 is the 0-based address, and the Gateway Device Name is whatever you name the EPIC in the Ignition gateway. Again, I got the unit id and address from the tool in groov manage.

You could always define address mappings in the gateway too, but I rarely use that and find it easier to put the addressing directly in the OPC path. Downside to that is you can’t browse any tags in the Tag Creator.

1 Like
4

Hi philip,
yes, that’s the way we went. We found this using a RIO and then seek for the functionality on the Epic.

Cheers,