Commercial Software

[andrew_pj]

Hi all,

I am new to AdvancedHMI. Before starting to use this software further, I would like to know anyone's opinion.
I just tried AdvancedHMI for several hours and I think this software is really great for rapid development.
I plan to introduce this to my colleagues and use it for development in our real project.
FYI, our project is targeted for industrial, so it is quite critical in terms of software reliability.

What do you guys think about it? Are AdvancedHMI safe enough to be used for this kind of purpose?
Maybe some experts can share their experiences here.
How about commercial terms? Any restriction besides GPL?
Thank you.


Best regards,
Andrew

[RedBinary]

The suitability is something you'll probably have to judge for yourself. There are really too many unknown variables on your end for anyone else to answer: The most important being "How solid is your programmer?"  All that I can say for certain is that I wrote an interface for one of our machines that we use on a daily basis. There was an issue with communication to begin with, but I rewrote part of the library and have never had a single problem since. You should be able to look through my comment history to see the code I changed and the length of time that the machine has been running trouble free.

[Noe]

I agree.

I had been running an application designed to comunicate with an SLC and a CompactLogix at the same time, both get just some integer registers and some strings for communication, but the application also controls a serial Zebra printer, a couple of serial scanners and an access database. Been using version 3.46 since January, stable (minor freezes related to pleople turning off PLC I have not had time to create a routine to handle it), some very rare random freezes form unknown reason. For being a Beta version -and free!-, I consider it pretty good enough.

I would say if you want some more personalized support (Archie gives a good one anyway in the forum), you could pay him for it.

[andrew_pj]

The suitability is something you'll probably have to judge for yourself. There are really too many unknown variables on your end for anyone else to answer: The most important being "How solid is your programmer?"  All that I can say for certain is that I wrote an interface for one of our machines that we use on a daily basis. There was an issue with communication to begin with, but I rewrote part of the library and have never had a single problem since. You should be able to look through my comment history to see the code I changed and the length of time that the machine has been running trouble free.

Thanks for sharing.
I think it is not a problem how solid the programming skill, AdvancedHMI has good forum support and until now the version is still updated.
I have doing some reliability testing and so far there are no major issues.
I plan to replace my current SCADA software with AdvancedHMI.

[andrew_pj]

I agree.

I had been running an application designed to comunicate with an SLC and a CompactLogix at the same time, both get just some integer registers and some strings for communication, but the application also controls a serial Zebra printer, a couple of serial scanners and an access database. Been using version 3.46 since January, stable (minor freezes related to pleople turning off PLC I have not had time to create a routine to handle it), some very rare random freezes form unknown reason. For being a Beta version -and free!-, I consider it pretty good enough.

I would say if you want some more personalized support (Archie gives a good one anyway in the forum), you could pay him for it.

Thanks for sharing.
I am interested with "some very rare random freezes form unknown reason" that you mentioned.
Do you still remember the details? for example after how long does it appear? And how do you fix it?

Yes I agree, Archie is very helpful.

[MrPike]

i am in the same boat as you andrew_pj.  I too want to deploy this but am uncertain if i can.  I would have to be able to support this if any issues arise and i personally am not good enough at VB.  It is a very great tool if you are the end user and expect a bug now and then but customers dont want "some very rare random freezes form unknown reason".  I am trying to determine a "stable" version before i spend alot of hours developing a project and think 3.86 is from my testing.  I started with 3.70 and got bogged down in version changes/reconstructed AHMI code.  This a wonderful software and am amazed at the level of support. Let us know how you make out.  thanks 

[Noe]

I agree.

I had been running an application designed to comunicate with an SLC and a CompactLogix at the same time, both get just some integer registers and some strings for communication, but the application also controls a serial Zebra printer, a couple of serial scanners and an access database. Been using version 3.46 since January, stable (minor freezes related to pleople turning off PLC I have not had time to create a routine to handle it), some very rare random freezes form unknown reason. For being a Beta version -and free!-, I consider it pretty good enough.

I would say if you want some more personalized support (Archie gives a good one anyway in the forum), you could pay him for it.

Thanks for sharing.
I am interested with "some very rare random freezes form unknown reason" that you mentioned.
Do you still remember the details? for example after how long does it appear? And how do you fix it?

Yes I agree, Archie is very helpful.

I still consider myself a newbie VB programmer, so my debug skills are still limited. Those freezes were unhandled exceptions when the aplication stopped responding, or even just thrown an unhandled execption without stopping the execution, so I really can't tell if it was my fault, or was an error in AHMI, but I would say more the former. I have added more error handling since my post, and my app has been running two shifts from Monday to Friday with no more errors reported. If they had any, they only had to close the program and start it again, so it usually will not mention them. So far they say "no problems" when I ask.

I would say AHMI is in a much more mature stage than when I made my project, and should be far more stable. If you want to know if is going to work for your commercial projects, then you need to start testing by yourself, as there is no other way to know it.

[andrew_pj]

i am in the same boat as you andrew_pj.  I too want to deploy this but am uncertain if i can.  I would have to be able to support this if any issues arise and i personally am not good enough at VB.  It is a very great tool if you are the end user and expect a bug now and then but customers dont want "some very rare random freezes form unknown reason".  I am trying to determine a "stable" version before i spend alot of hours developing a project and think 3.86 is from my testing.  I started with 3.70 and got bogged down in version changes/reconstructed AHMI code.  This a wonderful software and am amazed at the level of support. Let us know how you make out.  thanks

Thanks for sharing.
Yes, I agree the level of support is good, considering this is open-source software.

I am not trying to be unrealistic to say this, but the level of support that Archie did is better than technical support of commercial software that I currently used. So, it might be an absolute choice to migrate to AHMI after I have done all implementations and testings.


Best regards,
Andrew

[andrew_pj]

I agree.

I had been running an application designed to comunicate with an SLC and a CompactLogix at the same time, both get just some integer registers and some strings for communication, but the application also controls a serial Zebra printer, a couple of serial scanners and an access database. Been using version 3.46 since January, stable (minor freezes related to pleople turning off PLC I have not had time to create a routine to handle it), some very rare random freezes form unknown reason. For being a Beta version -and free!-, I consider it pretty good enough.

I would say if you want some more personalized support (Archie gives a good one anyway in the forum), you could pay him for it.

Thanks for sharing.
I am interested with "some very rare random freezes form unknown reason" that you mentioned.
Do you still remember the details? for example after how long does it appear? And how do you fix it?

Yes I agree, Archie is very helpful.

I still consider myself a newbie VB programmer, so my debug skills are still limited. Those freezes were unhandled exceptions when the aplication stopped responding, or even just thrown an unhandled execption without stopping the execution, so I really can't tell if it was my fault, or was an error in AHMI, but I would say more the former. I have added more error handling since my post, and my app has been running two shifts from Monday to Friday with no more errors reported. If they had any, they only had to close the program and start it again, so it usually will not mention them. So far they say "no problems" when I ask.

I would say AHMI is in a much more mature stage than when I made my project, and should be far more stable. If you want to know if is going to work for your commercial projects, then you need to start testing by yourself, as there is no other way to know it.

Thanks for your information, very useful.
And I fully agree that I need to test and verify it by myself.


Best regards,
Andrew