BY JEREMY POLLARD

In a world where hardware vendors are also your software vendors, it was surprising to find an independent software company that has survived with its HMI/SCADA software in this market.

Indusoft is not a new company; however, its concepts seem to be new, at least to me.

What originally attracted me to this company and its product was the pricing - inexpensive development, very inexpensive run-times, and they support Windows CE devices, as well as standard windows platforms.

With a six-inch TFT colour screen and a run-time for less than $500, you have an operator interface (OI) that can do anything. Very attractive, I thought. But I had to see how it worked before weighing in with my final verdict.

With any HMI/OI application, you need a communication driver, graphics editor, tag database, and the ability to generate alarms, trends and reports. The Indusoft Web Studio has all of that, and adds an additional benefit - the ability to view the results over Ethernet with a web browser. So far, so good.

The help file is complete, and includes links to PDF files for more detailed explanations. The demo applications that are provided are very complex, and provide a good roadmap to creating your own screens. The development environment is slick, and provides you with the tools you need to design and maintain your application easily. 

The database is proprietary, but this shouldn't be an issue for the type of applications that you would be using this product for. Log databases can be connected to standard formats, such as SQL.

The ability to have the run-time on various hardware platforms gives you some freedom of choice regarding hardware vendors for touch screen devices.

When a new project is opened, you simply tell the software what the target platform will be and it can import tags from various software packages. It can also import applications from competing operator interfaces. It supports many hardware and software platforms, which means more flexibility, as well as more configuration for us.

The first task is to select the target device. I have some PLCs in my lab, and selected a Rockwell Automation PLC-5 over Ethernet. The help system is not context sensitive, so I had to search the index for answers. I eventually found them, but it would have been much faster if the program took me there directly.

An annoying part of the configuration process is the driver window, which displays the names of the available drivers and their descriptions. The descriptions are too long for the dialogue box, and you can't expand the columns enough to view the entire description, so a bit of guesswork had to take place.

Once the driver was configured, I had to create some tags, which allow the graphics pages to display the real-time data. Opening up a graphics page is as easy as selecting the graphics tab in the development environment - right click and voila! The page can be configured easily with various methods, such as running a VB Script when the page opens.

MAIN.SCR must be the name of the startup page, and from there you can click your way into the process. You can add library objects by displaying the library page, double-clicking on the object, and then placing the object on your page by clicking onto the page at the location you want. Configure the tag for the object by replacing the pre-defined property and youíre done. Third-party Active-X controls are fully supported.

I was disappointed when I inserted a tag and found that there is no auto-completion on the tag name. If you have a large number of tags and don't know the name, a short list should be provided via the keyboard, but it is not. However, the list is accessible using the mouse.

Don't expect to pick up the software and run with it right away. It will take some time to learn the configurations for most of the objects, but once the curve is travelled, you will be well on your way to creating some very useful interfaces for your users, at a very reasonable cost.

Another very cool aspect of the software is that you can remotely view most components of your application over the web.

There are additional documentation manuals on the CD, which provide you with road maps for most features. I found the communication driver setup the hardest part to understand with the given material. The lack of context-sensitive help was very evident during the setup process and, unfortunately, the tutorial for the driver I selected wasn't there.

The software reminds me of a more expensive product I worked with a few years ago. Web Studio is a formidable competitor in the HMI/OI space. With the varying hardware platforms and web support, it should be part of your considerations for any project.


Jeremy Pollard is a 25-year veteran of the industrial automation industry. He has worked as a systems integrator, consultant and an educator in the field. Jeremy can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .