[00:00] In a previous lesson, we showed how Ignition is able to use its Omron driver to connect to Omron NJ devices. In this lesson, we will learn how Omron addressing works and how we can create OPC tags from an Omron device within Ignition. Unlike other types of devices Ignition supports, Omron devices do not support browsing, meaning that we cannot directly browse our OPC server for tags coming from an Omron PLC connection. What you would do instead is create a tag mapping for the device in the gateway. I am currently in the configure section of the gateway in the device connections menu, where we find all the device connections configured on this gateway. Here, I have an Omron NJ device connection as you can see. To get to its tag mapping page, we click on the More button on the right-hand side and select Tags. Here, I can manually map tags by adding rows to this table, like so.

[01:08] Each tag is given a name, a data type, a max character count for string-type tags, an element section for array tags, and we also get the ability to set read or write restrictions on each tag we create. Instead of manually mapping tags, we could also export variables from Sysmac Studio to create a tab-separated file, or TSV. This file can then be imported into Ignition to facilitate the tag mapping process. To demonstrate this, I will import a TSV file I obtained from Sysmac Studio. To import it, I will press the Browse button and browse for my TSV file. Note the two options given to us here on the top left. With overwrite selected, the contents of the tag table will be replaced by the tags I am importing, hence the warning above.

[02:03] I can also select to append the tags I am importing which won't override anything, it will just add the tags I am importing to the tags table without overriding. Now I can press the import button and see my tag mapping get created. Once I am happy with my tag mapping, I can scroll down to the bottom of the page and press the Save Changes button. Now that my mapping is completed, let's create some OPC tags. To do this, let's head to our designer. From our tag browser, I will press the plus button on the upper left-hand corner and select browse devices. Here, I can browse through the devices hosted by my Ignition OPC UA server Drilling into my Omron device connection, I will find all of the tags we mapped earlier. As we mentioned before, Omron devices do not support browsing. So without our tag mapping, there would be no tags for us to browse for here. What I will do is select some of my tags and add them to my default tag provider by pressing this arrow button in the middle of my window.

[03:13] Once I am happy with my selections, I will press OK, and I will find my tags now present in my tag browser. Drilling down into each folder I added, we will find our tags and their corresponding values coming directly from our Omron device. Now these tags are ready to be used in the development of your HMI/SCADA application.