My background is in networking, server management. I do a lot of old school scripting and hack around with various programming languages both high and low level. I had absolutely no skill in PLC devices at all so over the past few months I have been taking crash courses reading pretty much anything I can find. We brought in several different vendors to look at getting our PLC equipment data logging going and the prices were extremely high. I took the options the vendors offered in their programs and decided to see what we could do in house. I started out just wanting to view some of our equipment, in the end I ended up creating a Windows 2012 Hyper-V server with a full blown PLC 2012 Domain including a good firewall with VPN management, 2012 Domain Controller and SQL 2012 server plus a few virtual workstations for different PLC interface logging. The SQL server is handling over one million logs each month in just one table. I have the project at this time with capabilities to allow remote access for basic viewing, CEO charts and reports, e-mail and SMS alerting. The project is still growing as people find out what we are capable of. In our corporate meetings this is the highlight of successful achievements for our business over the past year. I stumbled upon this application of Archie's after doing some research which saved me a ton of hours on development to get the results we needed in house with a very small budget to work with. I purchased the items Archie offers for sale out of my own pocket as a way to say thanks for putting this out there for someone like me with absolutely no PLC knowledge to use for development. I am having a lot of fun with creating different backgrounds and arranging the PLC information in them for various eye popping displays. In the end we did pretty much everything the high dollar programs will do for a fraction of the price. We don't pay for any outside support if something needs to be modified and the business didn't take a hit on the bottom line for purchasing monitoring applications. I have to say that this is very addictive. I found myself writing code pretty much every evening and on weekends without being paid just because it was new to me and I enjoyed doing something different. I can really appreciate the time it took for someone to develop this program after the hours I poured into modifying my end to work with our business. Thanks for being there. I attached a photo taken with a phone, not very good quality but it was during the fun time with development when I was just kicking stuff around.
