Interfacing

Prodigy provides access to a whole host of industrial control equipment utilising everything from serial comms through to PC plug in cards to OPC.

For drivers available in Prodigy see OPC and all drivers included at no extra cost

Prodigy is supplied with I/O drivers that enable it to talk to thousands of different devices. These include PLC's RTU's PID controllers, DCS components, barcode readers, weighers, thermal scanners, scientific analysers, PC plug in cards and many more. In addition Prodigy supports OPC, making a vast array of third party OPC drivers available for use. This allows you to connect to virtually all hardware that supports remote communications.

New drivers are constantly being developed and Prodigy's Application Support Team can also supply custom drivers for specialist hardware. Alternatively, a Driver Development Kit is available to allow you to write your own Prodigy device drivers.

Prodigy's Driver Configuration program makes it easy to load and configure drivers. All of the drivers come complete with suggested communications values that can be quickly and easily changed as required. The Driver Configuration program also allows you to switch individual drivers into "debug" mode, providing useful diagnostics when required.

As well as drivers that communicate with external I/O, Prodigy comes complete with a set of derived drivers that perform calculations based on signal values. These include expression evaluation, integration, rolling averages, state times, and so on.

With Prodigy's intelligent driver addressing there is no need to look through the manuals for the correct addresses or work out complicated hex numbers. Simply specify the name of the parameter that you require and Prodigy does the rest.

By using an intelligent blocking algorithm, Prodigy automatically maximises throughput whilst minimising traffic on your serial communication ports. This calculates whether it is more efficient to request a particular address on its own, or to block it with other similar requests to reduce serial data traffic.

Prodigy attaches a range of attributes to each signal value. These attributes cover such things as the time of the measurement, the alarm state, whether the reading was automatically or manually generated, whether the signal value is valid and so on. These attributes ensure that the integrity of your signal data is 100%.