Okay, so the next Tab is this one labeled
UniInt. UniInt again stands for Universal
Interface. And this is where you are going to find all
those things that are common to all of our
Interfaces. So, for example, one of the
more useful of these is this Write
status to tags on shutdown. If you choose this
option, and then you, you specify some kind
of a digital state -- we suggest you just keep that one --
what it means is when this Interface shuts down, we are going to write
the word "Int Shut" into the record of that Interface.
And that's a lot better than the default behavior. If you do not have
that selected, when the Interface shuts down,
you are not going to see anything
that indicates the Interface was shut down. So, if
the Value were, you know, 50, when you shut the
Interface down, and then when you started it up the Value's a hundred,
you are going to see a straight line connected between the two
unless you write this Interface
Shutdown. So, we strongly suggest that. And,
and, some other things in here are simply those
bells and whistles that we have added,
you know, to, to the UniInt's
Standard over the years. And, at different points
in this class, we are going to come back to some of these.
You know, we will talk about Performance Points, we will talk about Health Points,
things like that. We are going to come back to some of these, but
there is such a wealth of options here. Again,
the best, the best reference
to all this is go out to this UniInt
Document and take a look at all the different switches. This
is where you would find this described in great detail.
And, again, that's the name of the manual, this UniInt
Interface Manual. Now I want to go back to this
first screen here, and just describe and then demonstrate
this. Again, this, this is going to be,
when it's selected, it's going to have the effect of writing a shutdown
notification, that Int Shut,
into the archive for all the Tags collected
by this Interface, when the Interface shuts down.
Now, almost all of our other Interfaces will go
ahead and accept when you set this setting right
here, and we will go ahead and do as we described. But this
one's a little different. The OPC Interface is actually going
to be setting that in the Interface
Specific Tab. Now, we have not look at this yet, but every
Interface has one of these. A little tab gets added
when you install the Interface that is specific
to that Interface. And, in this case, what I am looking for
is this Data Handling Section in there.
That's where we are going to set it for this. We are going to say we are going to
Write status to tags on shutdown and we are going to choose
Interface Shutdown. So, having done that,
now, I will go ahead and stop, or save my Interface.
We are going to be warned again. I think I have had that
warning enough. I know I am going to have to stop and restart.
I still have to stop
and restart one more
time after this, because, see, now that I have stopped,
when I restart, now it's going to load this switch
for the first time. So it's the next time I stop
the Interface that we are going to write that shutdown.
I will stop the Interface. I have waited a few
seconds and I will start it up again.
And, let's take a look at the big finish here.
And this is what I was hoping to see. As you can see,
right now the status of that is Interface Shutdown.
And now it's going back to collecting data.
And, if I drop a trend cursor, we can see exactly when
that happened. See, right at this point it's
telling us that that Value was Interface Shutdown.
So, that's, that's how you do it with the OPC Interface.
Remember, most of your Interfaces, you are going to be doing this
over here on the UniInt Section. But we do strongly recommend
you make use of that because, as you can see, you know,
the end result is, now, instead of just getting this
where we connect the dots, you get something that's genuinely
more information for people to use.
Now, while we are talking about this,
I want to point out that it's also possible to
write a Shutdown when the PI
Server itself shuts down. And to show you
that, I need to go over to the Point Configuration and show you.
Let, let's look at a tale of two, two Tags here.
This PI Tag, this is that Pump Test or Pump
Speed Test, this is getting data from the OPC
Interface. That's being collected on a Foreign Node, on a
Remote Interface Node, And, if you
take a look at this Section called Archive, you will notice there's an option here
called Shutdown, and that's turned off. And, that's
proper. But for a Tag whose Values are collected on
a Remote Node, you do not want to write the word Shutdown when the
PI Server shuts down because that's not going to affect the data
that's being buffered out on that Foreign Node. No, instead,
we set that to Off. Now, this Tag right here,
CDT158, it's actually gathered on the PI
Server and it could be -- well, in this case, it's a
Random Interface Tag, but it could be a Calculated Tag, or
some other Tag whose Values are being determined by the
Interface on the, by the PI Server.
In that event, what you want is the word Shutdown to be
turned On, or the Shutdown Setting to be turned On.
And that way, when the PI Server shuts down, we will see a
Value written to the Archive for that Tag.
And you will see an example of that right here. Let me go ahead and change this back
to two hours. I will show you what the
difference looks like between these two Tags.
Yeah. This is, this is showing two Tags. This is
the Pump Speed Tag. That's the one for whom shutdown is not
set. This Tag here,
this is that CDT158, and if
you look at this, it actually has written the word "shutdown."
Yeah, you see it over on the corner there, "shutdown."
It happened at 2:54. If I were to look at
2:54 for that same period for this Tag, you will not
see any Shutdown. There was no Shutdown written for that one
because Shutdown was not set On for that
Tag. There's a nice example
from the class documentation that explains what we are going after
here. What we are looking for is, you know, for this
period of time when the servers shut down
any Tags like this red Tag right here whose Values
are collected on the Server, that should write a Shutdown.
And then for the, the blue Tag here, that
Tag is not collected on a Server. That's on an Interface Node.
And that should continue to have data without the word
"shutdown" written. If you were to turn Shutdown on, you'd
actually see the little shutdown markers in these Tags.
So do not make that mistake. And then, of course, when
the Interface shuts down, when that shuts down we do want
Interface Shutdown to be written here. So that's the behavior
we are looking for from both of these different
configuration choices. Okay, so,
back to this Interface-specific Tab here. You will
notice that for the OPC Interface, boy, I will tell you,
did, did we go to town on this. I mean, look at all the different
switches here. There are a huge
amount of switches, and, and, of course, it's because
OPC is a huge standard that,
that is supported by lots of different vendors and, of course,
you know that all these different vendors have different favored features
that need to be supported, etc., and, and so, we are supporting
those. Now, the best place to find
documentation on each of these, like when we
touch, start talking about these advanced options within OPC,
the best place to find out about that is to go into the
Interface documentation. This is the documentation that
is, is deposited into the Directory
that contains the Interface itself. You will find
this Interface Manual there. That's where you will find
more information about those Interface-specific
switches. You know, we do not have a lot to say about them
in this class because there are hundreds of
Interfaces and each of those Interfaces has many
Interface-specific switches. Now we
sometimes have new additional parameters
that are not implemented in ICU
but are supported by the Interface. So, for example,
let's say we have added some new
switch and that switch is
slash, you know, abc equals
temporary. Or something like that.
This would be an example of making use of
the additional parameters field for those things
that are not yet covered in the
things that are specific here. So, it's, it's essentially
a way of adding things to the
start-up for this Interface that are not currently covered
by what we have done in ICU.
Now, next up, there's
a Service Tab. The Service Tab is where we do
all the things that are associated with running this Interface as a
Service. Now, if you are new to Windows
System Management, just to give you a real quick
idea of it -- within Windows
you can run applications as Services
which means they continue to run even
if you log off the machine. So, and it's something that
can be set up so that it automatically starts up every time
you start the Operating System. You can give it
specific dependencies. So, for example, I have made this
Interface dependent on pibuffss. That, that
really affects the order in which
these things are started up. We are going to start up pibuffss,
a buffering system, before we start up
this OPC Interface. There's other things associated
with this, like, how is it going to handle security? Is it
logging on as the local administrator or as a named user?
Now, all of these things are controlled within
this Service Applet. I can, you know, if, if this
were not running right now, I would be able to remove this as a
Service, and add it if it's not already added,
etc. So, this is where we handle those kind of
Service options. Then normally, when
you install an Interface it's installed properly as a Service,
you do not have to worry about this stuff. But if you do need to make
changes, this is where you can do that. Now, next, we have
this IO Rate Section. This allows you to create
what we call IO Rates Tags. An IO Rate Tag
it's a long-standing feature of PI. It allows you to create a
Tag that's stored in PI whose
Value is going to be the number eve of events, of events per
minute that, that are being sent by this Interface.
And this is going to report it in terms of
ten-minute averages. So, I will go ahead and create this. This is going to
be the name of it. As you can see, it's just generating a,
a name there, but you can modify that if you prefer.
I will go ahead and create it. At this point
I will go ahead and choose Apply. This is going to go ahead and make
that a, basically, a part of the system now.
Well, lastly, we have this Interface
Status Tab, and this is something that, to be frank, we are
going to ignore it in this class. We teach it in our System Manager II class.
You will find all about it in the documentation. If you are using our
Interface Status Utility, you are going to need to work with this.
Now, this has been a very long video that covers
a lot of ground. What I suggest you do,
if you are having trouble with an Interface, is concentrate on
these, the specific Interface
switches -- those that are specific to that Interface.
And, again, go out to your Interface
documentation to determine what those switches should be
set to, and what are the general recommendations for those
switches.