Find user stories of interesting ideas and solutions in this blog.
Note: The Makers Blog shows applications and user stories of community members that are not tested or reviewed by Phoenix Contact.
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If you can't get enough Microsoft, and if you like using Powershell on Windows, then you might be interested to know that Powershell can also be installed on PLCnext Control devices.
Please note the warning from Microsoft that this version of Powershell is only experimental.
The embedded datalogger is a wonderful tool to create databases of your process-data. The Notification manager and logger on the other hand is perfect to log user-actions or specific events. You can create your own notifications by modifying the example on GitHub.
In development or even sometimes in production you don't want to struggle with logging in to the sFTP server and copying the files every time you wan't to check your data or new logs. This blog will show you how to create a static file-server with GoLang to serve the files you need by simply browsing the right URI.
This video gives a brief introduction to the SNMP agent that is included in every PLCnext Control device.
For this demonstration, FL Network Manager software is used as the SNMP manager.
This is an update to an article that was originally published in November 2018.
All PLCnext Controls include an embedded OPC UA server. This server, like all OPC UA servers, includes the option to establish secure connections with clients using Public Key Cryptography. This guide describes how to use your own security certificate (including your own private key) to set up a secure OPC UA connection with a PLCnext Control.
If you want to wind down after a long day of coding, it is possible to have a little fun with your PLCnext Control device.
If you are familiar with the popular 2048 app, here is how to build and run a version it on a PLCnext Control device.
The latest release of PLCnext Control firmware (2020.3.1) introduces the Linux command-line utility "rsync". Rsync can be used to back up or synchronise files between devices on the same network, or across remote networks. This article demonstrates how to use rsync to synchronise files between a PLCnext Control device and a PC.
After I read the great blog entry from Dries about running Node-Red in a docker container, I thought it would be a could idea to share some tips.
A Docker container can be used to run a node-RED server on a PLCnext device. Although the other method described here is a little faster. The use of OCI containers comes with some advantages. For example when repeatedly using the same packages for an application it can be useful to build a standard image and just download it from Docker hub. Docker can also be used to start and stop the node-red server when we want to.
This blog will explain just that. First I'll guide you trough the installation process of Docker and we'll check the installation. We'll build a custom image with packages of to our liking pre-installed with a Dockerfile and create a container from our freshly created image. Finally we'll make sure our container will start on boot of the controller and push our image to Dockerhub.
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