OPC-UA Driver

Information

OPC-UA is the replacement for the older OPC-DA standard.

Driver InfoDetail
Driver Type:Live Only
Platforms:All

Driver Settings

This driver has two options.

OptionDescription
AddressThe address of the OPC-UA host machine, including the port number
NamespaceThe ID of the namespace node (usually 2 or 3)

Point Settings

OPC-UA points only have one setting - the full address of the point.

This is made up of a path of objects seperated by a slash (/) symbol, then a period (.) between the last object and its property.

UA points for a hierarchy - for instance, you might have a UA object called the Main Motor, which contains a Cooling System which in turn has a property called Outlet Temperature. The final UA point name would be…

Main Motor/Cooling System.Outlet Temperature

Performance Note

Some OPC-UA servers only support specific parts of the OPC-UA standard.

For this reason, the ARDI OPC-UA drivers use a slower but much more reliable search method when connecting. This makes the connection phase quite slow when you have large UA servers.

However, once the connection is completely stablished, OPC-UA is one of the fastest-update methods available, and has the least impact on your network. This is because OPC-UA is a subscription protocol - it only transmits changes to your data rather than needing to be constantly re-polled.