The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) recently issued an initial list of standards and other elements needed to support an interoperable smart grid. The NIST Framework and Roadmap for Smart Grid Interoperability Standards, Release 1.0, concentrates on standards that will help achieve interoperability among devices and systems. OPC Unified Architecture (UA) is one [...]

The results are in for the 2010 Control Readers’ Choice Awards. This annual survey of brand preference among suppliers of process automation technologies, represent the collective opinion of more than 1,000 process automation professionals. Those surveyed include the print magazine’s U.S.-centric readership as well as subscribers to their increasingly international digital media outlets anchored at [...]

I’ve been very remiss of late on getting blog posts up.  That will be my number one resolution for the coming year.  To make up for the lack of posts recently, I thought I’d do a recap of some of the noteworthy OPC happenings of 2009. This year saw a lot of activity from the [...]

Happy Halloween to all the ghouls and goblins out there.  Halloween is really a time of excitement, expectations and a little uncertainty.  What’s in the treat bag? Candy or Apples?  Who’s that behind the mask?  It’s that combined factor of anticipation and unknown that makes Halloween fun.  The same can be said for new interfaces. [...]

What is an Engineer’s favorite software tool? It has got to be Excel.  When I worked as a Project Engineer I had spreadsheets for everything!  Reports, graphs, data manipulation, text parsing. I’ve even had a flight simulator.  Excel is a great tool for analyzing and manipulating data, so it’s no surprise that there are OPC [...]

As Gary said in a recent post on tradeshow tips, this the event and conference season.  That means I’ll be on the road again spreading the OPC message.  This year I’ll be attending Emerson Exchange, ISA Expo and Rockwell’s Automation Fair.  Other MatrikonOPC folks will be showing up at Invensys OpsManage as well as globe [...]

Hackers.  That’s the headline for this recent article on possible vulnerabilities in the data communications to off-shore oil platforms.  It cites the fairly recent case of an IT contractor who was charged with sabotaging offshore oil rig computer systems. “Prosecutors say the contractor hacked into a shore-to-rig communications network that, among other functions, detected oil [...]

The ever popular free OPC tool, the MatrikonOPC Explorer now has support of the OPC Alarms and Events specification.  Being able to test connections to OPC A&E servers from the familiar OPC Explorer tool has been something that people have been wanting for some time now, and it’s finally here.  You can download the MatrikonOPC [...]

I’ve been away on vacation for the last few weeks, and will be on the road again for the next few weeks.  In the meantime a few more questions have been added to the “Ask The Experts” section. Speaking of questions, I had a query from Gary Mintchell regarding comments he’s heard about how OPC UA [...]

Based on the feedback I get both on and off-line, the audience of the blog really consists of two main groups of OPC users.  Those that know OPC and are interested in how others are using OPC in their systems and keeping abreast of what’s happeing with OPC and OPC UA.  The other large segment [...]