Red Lion Controls Announces Crimson 3.1 enhanced features for OPC Unified Architecture

New functionality simplifies communications from the shop floor to business systems

Red Lion Controls, the global experts in communication, monitoring and control for industrial automation and networking, today announced new capabilities for their award-winning Crimson® software, including an OPC UA Client driver with encrypted password support, OPC UA Historical Access, an MQTT connector for Google Cloud and store and forward buffering for all Crimson cloud connectors.

Unlike other OPC UA clients which may only allow access to a preexisting list of data items, with just a few clicks, Crimson 3.1’s new OPC UA client driver captures the rich attributes such as diagnostic and performance information, of a target OPC UA server’s data tags.

With this added capability, most Crimson 3.1-based devices can act as both OPC UA server and OPC UA client. “This can dramatically simplify system architectures, increase scalability and accelerate data integration initiatives with no additional hardware or expensive software customization required,” said Paul Bunnell, product management director for automation products at Red Lion Controls. “In addition, OPC UA Historical Access ensures the reliable transmission of real-time and historical data directly to enterprise business systems using a single, easy-to-use environment.”

On devices with an SD card, Crimson’s MQTT connectors can be configured to buffer data within the device when a connection to the target platform is not available. This feature can be set to indicate whether data should be buffered just to memory, or whether the device’s SD card should be used to provide further storage that will survive a power cycle – enhancing reliability and increasing system resilience.

To download Crimson 3.1 today, visit www.redlion.net/crimson-31 .

See how simple it is to configure communication between OPC UA clients and servers by visiting our YouTube channel, at https://youtu.be/5atvRaV-NQY