[00:00] In this lesson, we'll demonstrate how to connect to a DNP3 device in Ignition. Here we'll start out in our Ignition gateway's Config tab. To create a new device connection, we can scroll down a bit, to the OPC-UA section, where we can select its Device Connections link. This takes us to the Devices page, where we'll click on Create New Device. Here we see a list of all available device driver types. We'll select the DNP3 Driver option, scroll down to the bottom and click Next. Now we're prompted to configure the parameters of our device connection. The primary ones for us will be: the Name, a name for the device connection, which I'll set to DNP3_device; Hostname, the device's hostname or IP address, which for me will be 10.20.4.103; and the Source Address and Destination Address, those of the master and the outstation, which for my device will be 30,000 and 0.

[01:15] Your device parameters, of course, will vary. This is the minimal set of parameters needed to set up the device connection. We may also choose to configure some of the Data Acquisition parameters. The DNP3 driver supports event-based polling by class. So let's retain 10 second polling for Class 1 by keeping the 10,000 millisecond default. And perhaps we'll assume we are only doing Class 1 polling, so we'll disable Class 2 and Class 3 polling, by setting their poll rates to 0. We also have the option to enable Unsolicited Event Classes by setting this parameter to some comma separated list of classes 1, 2, and 3. We'll leave this at its default disabled state.

[02:03] There are also other advanced customization parameters available. For full descriptions of all settings, please refer to the Ignition User Manual. We'll go ahead and accept all other default parameter values by clicking on Create New Device. This brings us back to the earlier Devices page where we started. If we're successful, we'll see the specified dnp3_device added to the device connections list, with a status of Connected. Next, let's head over to our Designer. The DNP3 driver offers OPC Browsable capability of our tags, also called points by DNP3. Let's inspect some available tags by clicking Add, Browse Devices, then select the OPC-UA server and expand it: Devices, dnp3_device, Points. We see that the available points are named according to their function in an index value, such as AnalogInput5.

[03:06] Next, let's select a few tags for import. How about AnalogInput1, AnalogInput2, AnalogOutput2 and AnalogOutput3. We'll click the arrow to stage them for import. and then click. OK. If we'd like to rename any of these to use their known group, variation and index, or GVI, point naming, we can do so by editing their Name property in the Tag Editor. So for example, for AnalogInput1, we'll change AnalogInput1 to group 30, variation 1, index 1. And likewise for AnalogOutput2, we'll change AnalogOutput2 to group 40, variation 3, index 2. However, note that by doing so, we are reverting to legacy DNP3 polling, and won't be making use of available event-based polling.

[04:13] Finally, to make use of event-based polling, we need to set two values in the containing tag group. So we'll head over to Edit Tag Groups, select the tag group, here it's going to be Default, and in the OPC Uua section, set the Sampling Interval to 0 and the Queue Size to some desired value, perhaps 100. Now our device connection is configured to provide the latest 100 event values at the Class 1 sampling rate that we configured in our Gateway device connection. So in this lesson, we've shown how to create and configure a device connection with our DNP3 driver in Ignition.