Using Controllers not in the iX Library

[Shannon]

Our company makes military ruggedized PLC's. We previously used the QSI touchscreens as an HMI for our product, but since they are now legacy products we are exploring the A7/A12 screens with iX for the future.

Being a niche product, it is not built in as one of the controllers available in iX. We used ModbusTCP and multicasts as the main methods of communication with the old Gxx screens in the Qlarity environment. We could also support point to point ethernet as well. I am trying to understand what the best means of setting up communication would be in iX. Is it possible to create a custom controller and import that into iX?

I did not look into the example at length, but I saw from the Scripting FAQ that TCP/UDP communication can be done outside of the controller tag environment. Is that our best option?

[mark.monroe]

iX Developer has a Modbus TCP driver. As long as your unit meets the Modbus standard then it would work. You can programmatically control the serial and Ethernet ports using C# in an iX panel. However, you need to write all the C# code yourself to handles incoming/outgoing packets.

Such code cannot be imported or used like a normal iX Controller. Which means that you need to do everything manually in the C# code like poll the memory addresses on your controller as well as set the tag values in iX. You can not really create your own "Controller". You can create C# code that interacts with the Ethernet port and Serial ports.