From Chuck Harrell at Advantech:
Advantech, First Company to Launch Fully Functioning SCADA Client App for The Apple® iPhone® and iPad®
Advantech WebAccess Mobile is a lite version of the full Internet Explorer version: it has the necessary functionality for monitoring devices when users can’t be near a computer screen i.e. it can show alarms and take snapshots of the pages showing the current status of their dynamic elements; it can read and write tag values and has the new Trend function which monitors the datalog trends in real-time along a graph which, using gesture control, can be zoomed in upon to give more detail.
This free application is available immediately on the App Store from an iPhone or an iPad. For an online demo contact your Advantech representative. Another announcement will be made shortly about Advantech WebAccess Mobile being available on smartphones running the Android operating system.
A few hours before Chuck sent me this, I received a press release from a company in Argentina, ExemysMkT, who has developed an embedded SCADA implementation they call DAbin. According to the company, all you do is to create a Web application for your SCADA system
(which Exemys will be happy to do for you, I suppose for a fee), load it into the DAbin device, and connect up the sensors and switches. Then you monitor the SCADA system via the Web application.
These are just the froth on the real wave, which is an enormous sea change in the way we interact with our processes and production lines.
If you take a group of high school or college students into a typical control room, whether it is in the process industries or in the discrete manufacturing industries, they will see fresh, new 1980s technology. Any questions about why we don't have lines of GUI-savvy young people outside our manufacturing plants begging for a chance to help operate those wicked cool PCs with mouse and keyboard interface? After they've grown up with gaming GUIs and WII and smartphones and tablets, what do YOU think their reaction to what's in a modern control room (even one with huge video screens that mimic the old panel walls of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. We'd better hope that we can do better than "back to the future" control room designs and HMIs.
The likelihood of these revolutionary HMI designs coming from the major automation vendors is slim. After all, vendors have taken to giving out awards at their user groups for the company that has kept the most antiquated control system they ever built alive.
The designs are going to come from young, smart designers who were weaned on PlayStation, Wii, X-Box 360 and the other game consoles. Probably, the best HMI innovations will come from small, agile startups.
Be on the lookout, because this is a tsunami which will crest over us like the wave at Fukushima.
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