ProtoLink developed an OPC server capable of supporting installations containing thousands of ABB Totalflow measurement devices.
ProtoLink has developed two I/O servers to support ABB Automation’s Totalflow Measurement product line, which consists of the following devices: FCU, RTU, and AIU. The first, a 16-bit application suite named TDS, served as a network distributed DDE Server and was developed using DDEML; hence, it does not support higher throughput DDE protocols such as Wonderware FastDDE or Rockwell Software AdvanceDDE.
The newer version, TDS32, acts as an OPC, DDE, and SuiteLink server. It is capable of supporting installations containing over 4,000 Totalflow devices. TDS32 provides a Windows Explorer-like interface to allow operators to configure poll groups and monitor current data values and communication statistics.
One unique feature provided by TDS32 is the ability to lock devices for writing. When a DDE client pokes a new value to a device data point, that device is locked in order to prevent other clients from writing conflicting values. The lock will only be removed after the original client has instructed the driver to send the new values to the device or to discard the accumulated pokes.
TDS32 relies on a custom ProtoLink-developed COM object, named TAIServer, which serves as a common data repository for a number of Totalflow software applications.