The KineticaRT OPC Client component provides a connection to any OPC DA 2.0 compatible OPC servers.
There are thousands of OPC servers available from many different suppliers. These servers allow access to data from many sources including equipment containing Plant Floor data such as PLC devices and Analog IO cards.
The KineticaRT OPC Client consists of three separate components which correspond to the components of the OPC specifications:
This component makes the connection to the OPC server.
It requires the name of the OPC server.
This connects to a client (above) and sets up a group of channels. Each group then has its own update rate and DeadBand properties.
This is an individual channel containing a value. It must be connected to a group (above) and requires the ItemID property to be set to the name of the channel as known by the OPC Server.
You can connect display components such as the Dial directly to the item components.
There are actually two types of item. The "Item" has properties associated with a numerical channel such as Minimum and Maximum which are required for a Dial to scale itself. The "TextItem" has properties associated with text (string) channels.
The OPC Client will always connect to the server using an Async connection so that the server will only send updated channel values as required instead of having to continuously poll for new values. If you are connecting to a server on a remote machine (across a network) then the server must be registered as a COM server in the registry on the local machine and Windows security must be configured to allow the connection and to allow the remote server to make the asynchronous calls back to the local machine.