Just trying to determine the feasibility of possible future setup.
Is it possible to merge multiple Controller(S2)/Strategies into a single PAC Display Environment?
In our case, it would be four Controllers, with multiple Brains(SB2) associated with each Controller. The Display would merge information from each Controller.
Sorry if this is way off base, but we’re just trying to brainstorm.
Yes. I don’t have a PAC Display install in front of me just now to take a screenshot, but you just go into Configure Control Engines and add the IP address and strategy file for each controller.
At my previous job I had a single pac display with about 30 to 40 controllers connected.
Awesome.
So we took your advice and were able to add two control engines to PAC Control and PAC Display. We are currently running the same strategy on both. However, we are only able to “see” one of the controllers.
We noticed an “active” setting within PAC Control. Does that disable other controllers? Can PAC Display even recognize the same Strategy running on multiple Controllers?
Yes, of course it can, reason being the controller IP address is different.
I’m at work now and so here is a screenshot of PAC Display running the same strategies on two different controllers.
Exact same strategy, but two different controllers.
The key is that when you connect your PAC Display gadgets, you select the appropriate controller.
Like this.
Select your gadget, control driven attribute, then you FIRST select your controller, THEN your tag in that controller.
This way, when PAC Display runtime starts up, it will scan the gadgets on the page, build the OPCUA requests to that controller IP address and get those tags, then it will scan all the other controller IP address tags… Two controllers, same strategy tags, same PAC Display page different gadget states based on the tag value from that IP address.
As for active PAC Control controller… You can only have one controller per strategy (unless you are talking about our PAC Control Pro feature of redundant controllers or network - are you?)… so yes, when you select the active controllers, all the others are parked to the side and are not scanned by PAC Control. (Note that setting the PAC Control active controller does automatically change the IP address of that controller in PAC Display - if you change the active controller in PAC Control, you need to change the IP address of the controller in PAC Display Configurator and restart the runtime).
If you right click on the controller you can see that set active option.
Note how its grayed out when there is only controller;
Unless you are changing which controller you are running the strategy on, there is no need to have a bunch of controllers stacked up in the list. There is only, the top, active controller for that strategy at a time.
We were playing around after my second post and in a round about way, discovered what you posted. It worked and your post reaffirmed it…so that’s great. As we progress, I’ll try to post any other discoveries on the thread to help others out in the future. Our strategy is pretty massive, so it will take me some time to reassign all the “gadgets” to their respective controllers.
We really appreciate your help.
If you have windows connected to one control engine and you want to create a new window connected to a different control engine, you can export the window (In the Window menu) and then import it, which will allow you to select a different control engine. This may save a lot of time.
If only changing it on certain gadgets, you can multiple select those gadgets and use the Edit | Replace… function to replace the control engine.
Yes, I have a setup running a snap-pac-r2 with several eb-2’s and a separated snap-pac-r1 with several eb-2’s both totally different strategies but one common HMI in pac display.
“If only changing it on certain gadgets, you can multiple select those gadgets and use the Edit | Replace… function to replace the control engine.”
@philip, this just saved us days of work. You and @Beno have been a huge help.
Glad we could help, but just a gentle reminder, everything covered in this thread is well laid out in the PAC Display users guide… Might be worth a browse through at some stage.
