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LESSON
Connecting to Kepware OPC-UA
Description
Learn how to connect to a third-party OPC UA server such as Kepware or Matrikon.
Video recorded using: Ignition 7.9
Transcript
(open in window)[00:00] While Ignition has built-in drivers that allows it to connect to some devices, it doesn't have a driver for every single type of device. Ignition's OPC-UA server is great, because it can act as both an OPC-UA server and an OPC-UA client allowing it to connect to third party OPC-UA servers such as Kepware. This can greatly expand the range of devices that we can connect to. If we wanted to connect to a Kepware OPC-UA server, we first need to go to the Configuration section of the gateway webpage. We then need to scroll down to the OPC Connections section and click on the Servers link. You'll notice here we have our built-in Ignition OPC-UA server, but we want to connect to Kepware so we're going to click this Create new OPC Server Connection link. Since I'm going to be connecting to Kepware's OPC-UA server, I'm going to leave OPC-UA selected and click the Next button. Here, Ignition can actually discover the OPC-UA server for us, provided we give it an IP address and a port number. My Kepware OPC-UA server is installed locally, so first I'm just going to put localhost. I then want to put a colon, and then the port number, which in this case is 49320, because that's the default port that Kepware uses. If Kepware is not using the default port, I can figure out which port it's using by coming down to the Start bar and finding the Kepware icon. I can then right click on it, and go to OPC-UA Configuration. Here, under the Server Endpoints tab, you'll notice that it has an endpoint with the port number 49320. The IP address here is 127.0.0.1 which is localhost, so that's the one I'm going to be communicating over. I can go ahead and close this out for now and click the Discover button when I'm done. Here you can see I now have a list of options to choose from depending on what type of security I want. All of these are differing levels of security, and you can select the one that best fits your needs. I'm going to select this bottom one here and click the Next button. The last thing we need to do here is give our OPC connection a name. I'm just going to call mine "Kepware" and then scroll down and hit the Create New OPC Server Connection button. Now, before I do that, you'll notice there is an Authentication section here for a username and password. I didn't set up a username and password in my Kepware installation, so I don't actually need to put a username and password there. However, if you did set up a username and password for your Kepware installation, this is where you would put it in. Once I'm all done here, I make sure and hit this button at the bottom, and you'll notice I now have my Kepware server here. However, we can see that it's still Faulted. So that means it's not working. This is actually because in our Kepware installation we haven't trusted the Ignition certificate. To do this, we need to go back down to our Start bar, right-click on the Kepware icon, and go to the OPC-UA Configuration section again, and come up to the Trusted Clients tab. You'll notice here we have our Ignition OPC-UA client listed and there's a red X through it. This means it's not trusted yet. You make sure it's selected and come down and hit this Trust button. You'll notice now the red X is gone. We can now go ahead and close this Kepware window. And you may have noticed our Kepware server is now connected. I can now scroll down and go to my Quick Client and now you'll notice instead of just the Ignition's built-in internal OPC-UA server, we also have the Kepware OPC-UA server listed here. And if I were to connect any devices to it, they would be listed under Kepware.