aaOpenSource
Does this sound familiar? You’re working on an issue or a project and you have a brilliant idea for a tool to either save you lots of time or make a system run better. So you start working on it for a few nights, make some good progress, then you get busy, lose focus……you know the end of the story. But wow that really was a great idea and you really wish you could finish it.
At this point I’ve given up on even starting these projects because I know I’ll never finish them. Well, my efforts are pretty much wasted if I have started something then dropped it before it’s done and usable.
So here is my idea. I know we have some really brilliant people in the Archestranaut community. Also, because we’re all so good at what we do and very much in demand we don’t have enough time as individuals… but what if we pooled our efforts on a single project to come up with something great… nothing new here it’s called Open Sourcing. And that’s what I want to do with all of these cool projects we’ve all been working on .
So how do we get started? Having never run, much less contributed, to an open source project I don’t have any experience to lean on as to how we get going. So let me try this to get things kickstarted. Please respond to this post with the following items.
1) Name of your project
2) Two or three sentence description
3) How far along are you? Just being the seed of an idea is perfectly legit. We just need to know for reference.
4) What’s left to do and how long do you think it will take, if you have an idea.
Once we get a decent list of projects (hopefully we’ll get more than just my weak items) I’ll put together a poll and we can all vote on what to go for first. After we figure out what we’re going to do we’ll try to figure out the proper workflow using something GitHub or wherever the smart people do open source stuff.
The Archestranaut community has always been about sharing. In early discussions with the president of our company before we started the blog he was very clear that as far as he was concerned if us posting some really good info on the product made a difference as to whether we won or lost a job then we’re not doing enough of all the other things to win and then retain customers. I say this to encourage the other integrators on here to not be scared about contributing to something that will be shared by the community. There is so much more to doing great work for customers that has nothing to do with knowing how to implement a regex in quick script.
Let’s Get It!
Excellent idea, I will post it on the EURA Wonderclub community to see what they think of it. The Wonderclub is a tech community of SIs, WW distributors and WW operations. Everdyn and Automate (which I think you know) are part of it.
I keep you posted.
Oh totally. During my time at Wonderware, our department that developed the ArchestrA graphics tried to push to collaborate using knowledge-sharing Wiki technology (that was back in 2008). It never really caught on because of internal bickering and elbow jostling for higher positions.
That is not to say that ArchestrA-enthusiasts could not create their own Wiki outside of the Wonderware realm to gain and share knowledge. I would really love to see that even I have been out of the game since 2010.
What is the level of technical skill you envision being flexed in this open source community? Are you assuming folks are sophisticated enough to own and use the Toolkit? We’re at the stage where we take the COTS, determine if we use the BTL or another reference for I/O binding scripts (etc), and maybe write some unique template/object scripts to loop through attributes, analyze, and take action. I’d like to get us to the next step using the Toolkit once we have a project to drive the issue and offset funding.
As an SI, our group has a range of opinions about sharing information. Some of us, myself included, feel as you do that sharing application expertise is natural for a leader in the field and that competitive risk is low. Although in all honesty I think it’s the minority opinion at my firm…
I like the idea, we’ll contribute.
The only thing I see is the liability aspect. Some of our customers won’t like the idea to get that type of project in their system. We need to find a way to solve that issue.
Nicolas
This may be a very beneficial activity.
One thing that I have asked WW reps is if there is any plans on developing objects that could be used with RA’s PlantPAX. One strong point that I have to continually overcome is why buy WW when RA has these really nice objects already created and can be dropped on a screen and configured at runtime.
I’d like to see WW develop a package similar.
RA PlantPAX is indeed a nice setup, and frankly a good reason to pair it with RA FactoryTalk View. That said, it doesn’t take much effort to map App Server attributes to ControlLogix UDTs. It’s just busy work, and once that’s set up, it’s portable to other projects. I doubt WW would invest resources in integrating with PlantPAX when that product is a moving target that WW cannot control.
When my group talks about customizing Application Server, we’re usually looking at scripting objects to loop through their attributes, analyze values and conditions, and set outputs. You can add some nice functionality when an object has a built-in array called MyAlarmedAttributes, MyHistorizedAttributes, MyAnalogFieldAttributes, etc. Wonderware’s Base Template Library (the add-on from their downloads section, not the original base template installed from CD) has good working examples of arrays like that which I’ve used on projects as well as modified for other purposes. Wonderware’s system consultants are getting ahead of the curve on this one by building some of those scripts into the “aaSLIB” script library (for 3.5/2012 and later) so that there’s less Quickscript overhead at the App Server template level, and less configuration effort by the user.
My hunch is that the OP is looking a little higher at a super user level where more sophisticated problem solving can be done using the Toolkit. I’d still like to hear someone shed some light on these various tiers of capability and problem solving and what the focus of the suggested open source community might be. I’ve got a talented team of App Server engineers here and I’ll bet at least one of them would bite on the opportunity to grow and learn in such a collaborative effort…
One thing to remember — If working in a position for a company, any work in your field may be considered a “work for hire”, and thus owned by the company you work for. If you intend to publicly release something you’ve worked on, make sure you OK it with your company first, in writing if possible.
Respect for intellectual property is one of the pillars of Open Source (enforcement of the GPL and LGPL are done through copyright law, after all), and if someone ignores that pillar, it can put a lot of people’s work at risk.
I too am willing to contribute, but I agree with Nicolas that there are some thing to think about regarding liability and the open mindness of our customers. Nicolas, perhaps we can discuss this at our next WonderClub meeting?
My guess is that Open Source will be difficult for control functionality since issues need to get fixed expediently and without external dependencies, but there are for sure aspects of engineering tools, BI, KPIs and QM functionalities that will lend themselves very well to Open Source.
I agree also with Jay who makes a very important point.