Communication Driver Fundamentals

Summary:

• Communication drivers are tags. All the rules of tag structure must be followed when creating a driver.
• VTScada includes a standardized driver module, VTSDriver that provides a consistent interface to all I/O tags.
• VTSDriver relies on the communication driver tag to handle read/write requests according to the hardware’s protocol.

VTScada collects information from industrial equipment through hardware input devices, displays the information graphically on a computer, and sends control signals back to hardware output devices to control the operation of the equipment. Computers and hardware input/output devices do not use the same protocol to communicate, therefore a data translator is required to provide communication between the devices. This is the role of a communication driver.

In VTScada, communication drivers are in the form of a specialized tag type. Because each type, make, and model of I/O device uses a different communication protocol, many different communication driver tag types are required to provide the interface from these different I/O devices to the VTScada software.

VTScada ships with communication drivers for the following I/O devices:

Allen-Bradley, CalAmp, CIP, Data Flow RTUs

DNP3, MDS Diagnostic, Modicon, Omron Host Link

OPC Client and Server, Siemens S7, SNMP

… and more.

Tag types can have unlimited instances, therefore many copies of the same or different drivers may run at the same time, providing communication between your PC and multiple I/O device drivers.