Technofour’s GX series systems have built-in OPC-UA servers listening on port 4840 for ready integration into the Industry 4.0 environment.  Several tags of type string, integer and array of integer are defined on the server. Clients can subscribe to these tags and receive updated values as and when available. Servers are implicitly located in a secure environment, and only implement anonymous logins.

Eddy current parameters and settings such as frequency, gain, phase, thresholds, filters, evaluation modes etc are available as an array of integers. So is the Record tag, which contains a serial number, statistics and a ‘strip chart’ of test signal with a time stamp. Any change in parameters is also captured with user name and a time stamp.

Technofour can also supply an optimized OPC Client running on Windows platform that can connect with multiple GX systems, collect data from those and store it locally in an SQL database. Thereafter other applications can connect to the SQL server and process the data for local analysis or onward transmission to corporate cloud. The data can also be used as one of the key inputs to any digital twin implemented in the plant.