An Extender Success Story

Sewell Industrial Electronics

Since 1975, Sewell Industrial Electronics (www.sewellelectronics.com) has been providing panel construction and control system engineering & commissioning services to industrial clients nearby in Louisville, KY but also all over the world from Japan to Argentina, Africa, Europe, Russia, Australia, Hawaii, and of course the United States. Sewell focuses on electrical and controls engineering implementation of all types of processes. Their applications include material handling, food processing, communications, HVAC, Ice Machine Controllers, all kinds of test equipment, and more.

Steve Osborne, Electrical Engineer at Sewell, in addition to doing traditional HMI applications using off-the-shelf software, has been developing custom HMI's using Visual Basic 6 for a number of years. He recently made the move to using Visual Studio.NET 2005 for his custom applications and needed to be able to connect to OPC data sources for his applications. Making the move from Visual Basic 6 to Visual Studio.NET involved learning a lot of new .NET technologies and Steve was seeking a way to shorten that path when it came to connecting Visual Studio.NET 2005 to his OPC data sources.

Steve chose the Software Toolbox OPC Extender product because it enabled him to connect any object on his screen to OPC data in the Software Toolbox TOP Server OPC Server through point and click.  Steve says, "this product is an amazing tool – it's just like they say – point, click, connect and I can read and write OPC data from my OPC server. I just added the OPC Extender to my Visual Studio.NET application and off I went reading and writing data without code. What I really like even more is that if I want to go deeper to customize behavior or extend the functionality, they haven't kept me from being able to go into code and make it do just what I want. Usually it's one or the other when you choose a tool like this. With the OPC Extender I get both."

In Steve's latest application, he is talking to facility monitoring devices in stores. His application uses dial-up modems to connect to the remote stations for real time monitoring and logging.  He used the dialup capabilities in the TOP Server OPC servers to ease the management of the dial-up connections. Using one instance of the Software Toolbox OPC Extender he managed the interface between the user choosing the location to dial and dialing interface in the OPC Server. A second instance then collects the data when he connects to the remote location.

Steve adds, "The support from the team at Software Toolbox has also been a key part of my success. Their people have listened to my application needs, continued to expand and enhance the OPC Extender product to meet my needs, and been willing to show me how to best use their tools together in Visual Studio.NET 2005. I feel with the Software Toolbox OPC Extender and TOP Server together, I have a set of tools that will enable my business to effectively meet our client's needs in a more profitable way than if I just wrote all the code for this on my own."

Steve has plans for many other projects using the OPC Extender and TOP Server with Visual Studio.NET 2005 including a simulator project for an appliance manufacturer as his next project.