This project binds to the AVEVA Plant SCADA runtime from go. It provides bindings for all of the functions, and a reasonable facade for the ones that are most commonly used.
I am also providing some bindings for the Alarms Database (odbc) connection. You might be able to get away with only using the API, but there are fields in the database that aren't available through the API. More importantly, the database has a table CDBEventJournal that you can use to get a time-ordered list of alarm activity - including new rows when an alarm is Raised, Cleared, or Acknowledged. This is the most practical way to 'follow' an alarm history without having to maintain state and manually diff rows in the AlarmSummary as viewed from the API.
- estradege/citect is a project that builds a dotnet wrapper around CtApi.
- pyctapy does similar for Python
I make no claims about either of those projects, but both give you some idea what you can do with this interface.
YOU ARE OPERATING AT YOUR OWN RISK. Do not use this for any life safety concerns whatsoever.
I am releasing this under an Apache 2.0 license, but if you need it to be something else please contact me. Consider this "postcard-ware" in that I'd appreciate a note if you find any of this useful.
SCADA software tends to be frustrating if you're a software engineer. I think the reason for this is that these suites were designed with controls engineers in mind, not software engineers. The result is often somewhat limiting, easy for those kinds of engineers but difficult to things that are out of the normal usage patterns. In a nutshell, that's me.
I wrote this library because I simply couldn't do what I wanted in CiCode. CiCode can do all the normal things, but it can't handle REST calls, JSON/XML serialization, and having a sane way to open sockets to other services. On the notification front, you can send an e-mail but it's only through MAPI (which is pretty obsolete). It can talk to SMTP servers but not really handle DNS or certificate-based e-mail security. In the current age, you don't want to send notifications by blindly launching e-mail or text messages anyway.
I am using this library for a few things:
- Integrating with external IIoT frameworks like Amazon SiteWise and IoT Core
- Storing data in a modern, time-series database like TimescaleDB or Influx, so that I can have much more flexibility visualizing data and take advantage of time-series database functions for gap filling, aggregation, and per-signal interpolation (and not spend a million dollars on OSISoft PI)
- Linking to a more robust notification solution that supports duty schedules, resolution tracking, and a mobile push API. Some people like PagerDuty. but I use Squadcast which is also good. Grafana OnCall is new (as of the time I wrote this) but it looks like they have the right idea.
Of course, all of this could have been done in Visual Studio (but why?)
To initialize the library, first get an instance of CtApi by calling Init(). Pass in the name of the DLL, and the path to the directory containing it. Note that I have done all my development with the 64-bit version - it may be possible to do this with a 32-bit version as well if you build for that - I haven't tried, though, and I'm a little worried about how it will handle UTF16 strings. If you try it and it works (or doesn't) please drop me a note and let me know.
var dllPath = "C:\\Program Files (x86)\\AVEVA Plant SCADA\\Bin\\Bin (x64)"
api, err := ctapi.Init("CtApi.dll", dllPath)
if err != nil {
panic(err)
}The initialization will open the DLL and find the exported functions. At this point, you can open a connection to Plant SCADA:
handle, err := api.CtOpen()
if err != nil {
panic(err)
} else {
println(handle)
}
defer api.CtClose(handle)
The Find API is a little odd to use, so I have wrapped it in something as close to a generator as go allows
const tableName = "Tag"
const propertyName = "TAG"
for hObj := range api.FindAll(handle, tableName) {
tag, e := api.GetStringProperty(hObj, propertyName)
if e != nil {
fmt.Printf("There was an error getting the string property: %v\n", e)
} else {
fmt.Printf("%v \n", tag)
}
}This enumerates all items from the Tag table, then gets the property named TAG and
prints it to the screen. The TAG property is the tag name. You can use FindAll to
find other sorts of things including Alarm (alarm tags), DigAlm (digital alarm tags),
Trend, and a few other types. Each table has its own unique set of properties. To
find out what they are, refer to
the Browse Function Field Reference
documentation (you have to have an AVEVA support account for this link to work).