Day 1 of this year’s Ignition Community Conference is in the books… and what a fabulous day it was!  There were several exciting take-aways from our first day at the conference… most of which will be covered in the Day 2 post after we hear the keynote address.  Intellic attended 1 workshop and several industry meet-ups.  Yours truly attended the manufacturing and power/utilities meet-ups and will be referencing these meetings in this mornings post.

Highlights:

1. It doesn’t sound like there will be any major reveals at the conference this year.  8.0, Blaze (Ignition’s HTML5 offering that has been in development since 2016) is likely not to release until Q3 of 2018–or so the rumor is.  I’m hoping to hear more about this today.
2. IIOT/MQTT by Cirrus Link and Sepasoft’s OEE 2.0 modules are the hot topic this year.  OEE 2.0 addresses many of the issues with performance and flexible data modeling that developers/end-users have wanted to see fixed for a couple years now… and Sepasoft’s new offering doesn’t disappoint.  Intellic was part of the beta testing and we have kicked off a major OEE 2.0 implementation within the past couple of weeks… we have been happy with the new module and are delighted to hear that the community is receiving it well too.  The Azure Injector module by Cirrus Link is generating a lot of buzz as well… we have recently completed an implementation using a Raspberry Pi, Ignition Agent, Ignition Controller, Azure Injector to Azure IOT Hub and have been very happy with the functionality.  Cirrus Link continues to push the envelope at a break-neck pace with their IIOT/MQTT module offerings.  MQTT is a powerful, lean protocol… and it is here to stay.  I’ll have a future post that demo’s our implementation to help explain the value proposition better to those who are just getting started with IIOT.
3. Canary Labs historian is one of our favorites.  I heard through the grapevine that a connector is currently in development that will serve Ignition tags to Canary’s historian for analytics using Canary’s powerful front-end.  This is an exciting development and one we are looking forward to.  At CSIA earlier this year, we pitched this idea to IA along with Canary and are happy to hear something may be coming of it.  (fingers crossed)
4. Perfect Abstractions has released a new module this week.  3-D Charts is a powerful tool for building 3 dimensional charts and graphs in Ignition.  I am especially happy to see the surface chart–which will serve as a nice solution for plotting profile gauge data in extrusion and steel processes.  Check out the quick video below I captured with Nick Mudge.

Day 1 was exciting and did not disappoint.  Today, we will be attending sessions across all industries while spending quality time with friends–old and new.  Tonight is the reception and dinner at the Palladio and then off to the Fat Rabbit for some drinks (ICC tradition).  I will likely be live blogging the sessions I attend today–assuming wi-fi cooperates.

Blessings,

Walker