Scada at HMI prices
15 Jan 2000
The type of animated displays, monitoring and reporting facilities usually associated with expensive Scada systems are now available at a fraction of the cost on four new Magelis TXBT graphical human-machine interface terminals from Schneider Electric.
Sold under the Modicon and Telemecanique brands, the terminals cost from £1799, yet all feature 10in high-visibility screens, with options of monochrome or 256-colour TFT. All are pre-installed with Windows 95.
Facilities offered include full graphical animation; real-time trend analysis; OLE links to applications such as Excel; alarm logging and recipe storage; and report generation.
Interfacing with control systems is said to be easy with the Magelis operating system, which allows unlimited access to PLC memory variables, either directly or by using a symbols database shared with the PLC.
This is claimed to eliminate the problem often experienced with traditional Scada systems, where users are limited by a predefined number of memory tags.
