With OPC-UA, a platform and vendor-neutral data access specification, connecting any PLC device to Ignition is easy. Device connections are done over the Ethernet for those devices for which there is an Ignition device driver.
- The Allen Bradley drivers in Ignition include: ControlLogix, CompactLogix, PLC-5, MicroLogix, and SLC Allen-Bradley. They can connect directly through the Gateway to devices that support Ethernet communications.
- The Modbus driver allows Ignition to communicate with any device that supports Modbus TCP protocol.
- The Siemens drivers in Ignition provide support for connecting to S7-300, S7-400, and S7-1200 PLCs via TCP/IP using the S7 protocol.
- The TCP driver allows you to communicate to barcode scanners, scales, and more. They are strictly passive listeners and are configured to connect to one or more ports on a given IP address and any ASCII characters that are brought in as tags.
Ignition can easily and quickly connect to third party OPC servers via OPC-UA or OPC-DA (using the OPC-COM module) for devices that do not have a supported driver.