Clark: Welcome back to the Deep Dive. Okay, so if you’re working in industry, you’re probably swimming in data from all sorts of systems. OPC servers. Right. Pushing out numbers from PLCs, sensors.

Sam: Yeah, constantly. OPC, UA, the newer stuff, OPCDA, the older stuff, it’s just a stream of raw values.

Clark: And dealing with that raw data, well, it can be a bit much sometimes you just need to do some, you know, basic math on it. Or maybe something a bit more involved.

Sam: Exactly. Like converting units, maybe adding a few things together, perhaps some simple statistics. And historically, that often meant someone had.

Clark: To write code, which isn’t always ideal or even possible for everyone involved. So what if you could do those calculations, kind of like you do in Excel, but directly on that live, real time, industrial data without coding? You mean without writing a single line of code? Yeah, that’s really the core idea behind OPC Calculator. It’s a feature within OPC Expert.

Sam: Okay. So it’s like a dedicated tool for this specific task.

Clark: Right. A central place to set up and manage all those calculations you need. So for today’s Deep Dive, we thought we’d explore how this OPC calculator actually makes that happen.

Sam: Sounds good. So where do we start? What’s the first thing you notice about it?

Clark: Well, the big thing they push is ease of use. They talk about a drag and drop interface.

Sam: Ah. So no scripting languages to learn. No complex syntax. You just drag items onto a screen.

Clark: Seems like it. You visually build a calculation connecting the data points you want to use and the operations you want to perform.

Sam: That definitely lowers the barrier to entry. And I think you mentioned Excel.

Clark: Yeah. The formulas themselves are designed to be familiar, like Excel formulas. So if you know how to write sum A1, A5 or B 21.8 plus 32, you’re probably, you know, halfway there.

Sam: Okay, that makes sense. Familiarity helps adoption. And can it handle data from just one source or.

Clark: No, that’s another key point. It can pull data from multiple OPCDA servers at the same time.

Sam: Oh, interesting. So you could, say, grab a temperature from one machine’s PLC and a pressure from another and combine them in a calculation.

Clark: Exactly. For things like aggregation or maybe calculating an overall efficiency metric across different lines.

Sam: Right now, one issue I’ve seen pop up is consistency. If you have, like an HMI doing a calculation, one way Maybe a reporting tool, doing it slightly differently.

Clark: I get chaos. Right? Different numbers for the same thing, depending on where you look.

Sam: Yeah, it can be a real nightmare trying to reconcile that.

Clark: So OPC calculator aims to solve that by being that central engine. All the calculations happen in one place using one defined formula.

Sam: Okay, so you define it once in OPC calculator and that’s the official result.

Clark: Pretty much. And then those calculated results aren’t just stuck inside OPC calculator, you can send them out.

Sam: Send them where? Back to another OPC server?

Clark: Yep. You can push them to any OPC server, DA or ua, or you can store them directly into databases. Think SQL Server, Oracle, even Ms. Access.

Sam: Hmm. So it becomes a reliable source for that calculated value, accessible to other systems. That avoids those consistency headaches.

Clark: Okay, so it’s user friendly, it helps with consistency. What about the actual horsepower? Can it handle, you know, demanding calculations?

Sam: Well, it’s designed for real time data, so it needs to be reasonably performant. They mentioned it handles multi threaded calculations.

Clark: Meaning you can do several things at once without getting bogged down.

Sam: Essentially, yes. And within those Excel like formulas, you’ve got a decent range of functions. Your standard math, trig functions, but also logical stuff, FS statements A and D or that kind of thing.

Clark: So you can build some fairly complex logic if you need to. What about simple adjustments? Like maybe a sensor has drifted slightly or you need to convert Celsius to Fahrenheit.

Sam: Yeah, absolutely. You can build factors and offsets right into the formulas. So like sensor value 1.025, that kind of thing. It’s crucial for those real world tweaks.

Clark: And how often do these calculations run? Is it just constantly recalculating?

Sam: You’ve got options there. You can schedule them, say, calculate an average every 15 minutes or, and this is often more efficient, you, you can trigger them based on data changes.

Clark: Ah, so only calculate when one of the input values actually changes.

Sam: Exactly. Why waste CPU cycles recalculating if nothing’s different?

Clark: Right?

Sam: That event driven approach is pretty smart for real time systems.

Clark: Makes sense.

Sam: So whether you’re dealing with older PLCs using OPCDA, modern systems with OPC, UA web services via REST or IoT devices talking MQTT. The idea is that OPC calculator can likely connect and pull that data in. It’s trying to be that central hub.

Clark: We’ve really just scratched the surface of OPC Expert today, focusing on the calculator feature. Maybe we can explore other aspects in the future, but for now thanks for joining us on the deep dive.