• OPC UA Client is a free client tool that supports the main OPC Unified Architecture information models. These models are Data Access, Alarms & Conditions, and Historical Data Access. In fact, it offers the capability to: Discover local and remote OPC UA servers.
• Each OPC Server from MatrikonOPC has built-in OPC Security and Redundancy. Free downloads are available. MatrikonOPC is the world's largest provider of OPC Servers, OPC Clients and OPC Historians. MatrikonOPC is a charter member of the OPC Foundation, and has demonstrated a commitment to developing OPC as the industrial connectivity standard.
• In addition, several OPC vendors offer free downloads of toolkit products, for evaluation purposes. Note: some older OPC demos and samples may include outdated proxy/stub DLLs which could affect the integrity of other installed OPC applications. See our earlier article on this problem.

• Opc Da Client Free Download

Free and easy to use OPC client by Matrikon OPC The tools which appear on this page are all supplied free of charge, and are either pre-built or supplied as 'ready to build' source code, or both. Some are evaluation versions, and are identified as such. They may all be downloaded from the Web. OPC to Microsoft Excel is possible using OPC Expert with a quick drag-and-drop. Join the ease of Excel with OPC for powerful results. View real-time OPC data, create complex calculations, generate reports, and more with OPC Expert. Free and easy to use OPC client. Supports OPC DA 2.0 and 1.0, and A&E. The only OPC Client we have found that supports the OPC Security 1.0 specification. Matrikon OPC. OPC HDA Explorer. Free tool for verifying historical data through HDA, testing HDA servers, and troubleshooting connectivity to HDA servers. Matrikon OPC.

I have an application whereby I need to read data from a PLC into a database and whereby I need to develop my own application to do this. I just need to read 5 values from the PLC and log it to a DB. I have a demo OPC server running and can access it via UA or DA.

After looking at many different approaches I settled on using an OPC server to connect to the PLC and then to write an OPC client to interface to the OPC server and then write the data to the DB from my app. My language of choice is C# with .Net and the only licence fee I am able to pay for is for the OPC server from my PLC vendor.

What I am however finding extremely frustrating is getting the right info on OPC to get started. I dont want to buy any stacks but would prefer an open source stack. The information seems very fragmented and all over the place. Most of the info about OPC seems to be hype about how easy it is to use etc.

The best post on Stackoverflow that I could find is: Noob guide to OPC: how to write a C# Hello World client? and some of the links are not active any more.

My question is therefore are there any good tutorials showing how to build and OPC client from scratch in .net and what is the best open source SDK to use without having to buy a vendor's stack?

Is DA also worth learning or should one stick with UA?

The big question is why is OPC so frustrating when its marketed as being so easy?

It would also be nice to have a nice high level guide on the theory that one needs to know to build a client. I do realize that with time its possible to eventually figure this from the resources available but with limited time to make sense of all the scattered resources a quicker guide would be helpful.

1 Answer

Stick with OPC UA.

Luckily for you, the OPC Foundation's C# reference implementation has the capabilities of both stack and SDK, whereas other language reference implementations are typically just stack functionality.

The code is available on GitHub: http://opcfoundation.github.io/UA-.NET/

If you're not a member of the foundation the code is available under GPL2.

As for your concerns about the ease of use and marketing... I assume it's because OPC UA is marketed towards end users, who will just be hooking up various OPC UA compliant applications, which is easy. As a developer I think its fair to say there's a little more assumed about your ability to figure things out... from code examples, the specifications, books that are available, etc...

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