[00:00] Let's take a look at creating tags for Omron FINS Device Connections. I have an Omron FINS TCP device connection already configured in my Gateway and I'd like to access some values inside that device connection. There are a couple of different ways to do this. As you've seen other videos, we could manually create OPC tags in the Designer, but there's another, more efficient method we'll explore together in this lesson as well. Just a quick note before we jump in, although this is a FINS TCP connection, the same technique will work just as well with a UDP connection, since they share the same address page. We'll start by going to the addresses page in this FINS device connection. Here, we can click on the three dots menu and select addresses. In this user interface, we can effectively create nodes inside of our OPC UA server that are then browsable. Then those nodes can be assigned addresses from inside the device's programming. To understand how this works, we need to know a thing or two about syntax and this particular driver.

[01:06] I'm gonna switch over to our User Manual, and we'll check out the Omron FINS driver page. This page may change over time, depending on when you watch this video. I'll head over to the side navigation to find the Addressing section and click on Examples. When we fill out the Addresses page on the Gateway, we'll basically follow this example here. Some of these items in the syntax example are optional, so we'll begin with the Area. If I head back up to Addressing, there's a table that spells out all the Data Areas which correspond to Memory Areas inside the device. This table gives us the notation that we'll need to use to access those areas. If I return to the example section in the docs, we see that the next part of the syntax is the optional data type tucked inside a set of curly braces and nested angle braces. The offset and bit are also optional, but they can help specify the starting word or register address and a particular bit within that word. Let's head back to the Gateway, and we can add a row to this program.

[02:07] The tag path here represents the node that we're gonna be browsing for inside of our OPC UA server. I'll call it test tag. For the address, to point to the proper location in the program, we'll start in the auxiliary bit area with either AR or A, the float data type, and an offset of 723. There's also an optional description here. You won't see this on the tag as you're browsing, but if you create export file, it'll contain the description, which is helpful when you have a lot of rows here. Let's go ahead and save the configuration and we can switch over to the designer. If we go to the tag browser and click on the plus sign, we can browse for our FINS TCP device connection. I'll go into the tags folder and we can see the test tag that we created a moment ago. So, if we drag this over into the tag browser, it'll create a float OPC tag for us. Double-clicking on this tag will show the OPC data path, and we can see that part of the path here looks really familiar.

[03:05] There's that AR float 723. We also have the device name and the namespace that all our drivers use. Let's head back to the Gateway and use the three dots menu to return to the addresses page. If we wanna add a little bit of structure inside the OPC browser, we can do that with the tag path. I'll add a couple of folders to our tag path like this and save my changes. If we go back to the designer, we can see that adding those folders to the tag path doesn't really impact our existing tag at first. I'll close out the tag editor window and we can refresh the OPC browser. Now, if I drill down into my FINS TCP device and its tags, we see the new folders we added after the fact and our test tag within. There's an additional time saver that we can explore if we go back to the Addresses page in the Gateway. I have a CSV file which has a bunch of tags I'd like to import all at once. The interface can handle different types of files, if you prefer to use TSV or CXR format instead. I'll select my file and import it into the program.

[04:10] This action overwrites any existing tags in the configuration, so if I had wanted to maintain my first test tag, I could have just merged that entry into this configuration file before doing my import. Let's save our changes and go back to the designer. We'll refresh the OPC browser and drill down into the device tags to find the new entries from our import. The import process makes it easy and quick to set up multiple tags at once. Knowing how to manually create individual tags, gaining familiarity with the required syntax, structuring tag paths for better organization, and utilizing file import tools for bulk creation of multiple tags will help make the process of working with Omron FINS devices more efficient and less error-prone, especially when dealing with a large number of data points.