The first live value

The walk from an empty Connector to a tag that reads: the driver, the device, the tag, the first poll, and the Logic address the value gets.

View as Markdown
  1. Open Connector on the rail. The column on the left is called Communication; on a new station no driver is added yet, so it opens with its Drivers folder selected, and the panel lists every driver the package ships, grouped by the equipment it reaches. For a first try, the built-in Simulated driver needs no hardware. See Drivers.
  2. Press Add driver on the driver's row in that list: the driver stands under Drivers in the tree and its row is marked in the list. Press Open on that row, then Add device on the driver's page (a driver that can find equipment also offers Discover); the column's + does the same through Add driver, then the driver's New device. The new device is marked in the page's Devices table, and its Open leads to its card, which takes a Name, a Poll interval (ms) and the connection fields the driver needs; every field saves as you leave it. See Devices.
  3. On the device page, press Add tag on the Tags card. The new row takes a name, the address the driver expects on the device, a data type and an access; the tag joins the grid and the tree.
  4. The embedded runtime connects in the background and starts polling. Until the device answers, the status bar's health reads "Connector: device not communicating" in red and the device counts under the Issues chip of the Connector column; an unreachable device costs nothing else, its tags read bad quality until the connection lands. That wait begins once the device has an address: a device whose host is not entered yet is not tried at all, so its row reads "Host not entered yet" and it stays under the OK chip.
  5. Select the tag. Its page shows the Live value card (the current value, the source timestamp and the application timestamp), and the Conversion card explains how the raw reading became the engineering value. See Tags and The value pipeline.

That value now has a Logic address, Connector.<Driver>.<Device>.<Tag> (with a folder segment for a device filed in a folder), and is ready to be shown on a dashboard, read from an expression in Logic, or bound to a channel of a Process model. Other OPC UA clients read it once you let them in: the embedded server is turned off on a new station, so turn it on with Enable on its row in the Connector, and trust the client's certificate on its Client access card, before pointing a client at it.