Fleet Portal: A Solution for Monitoring and Controlling Real-Time Controllers and PCs from SystemLink

[JohnBergmans]

Developers requiring advanced user interfaces for SystemLink might be interested in Bergmans Mechatronics’ Fleet Portal package which enables browser-based monitoring, control and management of applications operating on a fleet of NI real-time controllers and PCs.

To create a Fleet Portal UI, a LabVIEW developer first creates a “Portal” VI that performs functions such as aggregation, processing and display of data from multiple controllers, transmission of control data to one or more controllers and writing data to a database. The LabSocket add-on tool for LabVIEW is then used to automatically generate a web client from the Portal VI front panel that is integrated into SystemLink using the Skyline Web Interface Framework.

The Portal web client can also be configured to enable the user to navigate to the web client of real-time applications that operate on each controller in the network.  This capability to access applications on individual controllers via the Portal can streamline the diagnostics and fine-tuning of the process associated with each controller.

Advantages of Fleet Portal over solutions such as custom web applications, WebVIs and the new SystemLink dashboard include:

- Continuous data processing can be performed on a central VI, without any browsers connected to the system

- LabVIEW API calls can be used for database access or other functions

A short video about Fleet Portal is available at: https://youtu.be/Ux65EIZ2H3U and a schematic of the demo system used in the video is shown below.  

I welcome any comments or questions about Fleet Portal.

John Bergmans

Bergmans Mechatronics LLC

1-714-474-8956 (8 AM to 6 PM US CT)

Fleet Portal System Overview

[viScience]

Interesting ideas... You made mention of the OSISoft PI server toolkit but could not find any active links to this.  I am interested in using skyline to create a large scale distributed data logging system and would need historical data services, do you have any recommendations?

[JohnBergmans]

Hi viScience.

The following link used to have information on the OSIsoft PI System Connectivity Toolkit for LabVIEW:

https://forums.ni.com/t5/Reference-Design-Content/OSIsoft-PI-System-connectivity-toolkit-for-LabVIEW....  For some reason, though, this page is now giving me a "Document Not Found" error.

I was able to find this cached page containing detailed information about the toolkit: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:dPuB6wZr4R0J:https://forums.ni.com/t5/tkb/arti....

-John

[JohnBergmans]

Just FYI, the new Dashboard Builder in SystemLink 17.5 supports iFrames.  As a result, the Fleet Portal web client can be integrated into a SystemLink dashboard (see below). iFrame support also means that one or more web clients for real-time applications, created using LabSocket-E (http://labsocket.com/LabSocket-E.html), could be incorporated into a SystemLink dashboard.

The combination of Dashboard Builder, LabSocket and LabSocket-E should help to simplify the development of browser-based UIs and LabVIEW backends for monitoring and control of distributed systems.

-JLB

Fleet Portal Web Client in Dashboard iFrame