An Overview of Soft-IO
Welcome to Soft-I/O!
We look forward to sharing with you a story that has been a long time in the making. The story is about a product like no other in the world. The product is Soft-I/O. Our business is control systems, and our specialty is high-speed, complex machines that have many parts, some moving, some heating, mixing, annealing or maybe just holding down the floor. These machines are all run by computers, marvelously powerful processors that can act based upon what they compute based upon what they sense.
The key concept here is that the computer needs to sense and then act. A computer control system senses with sensors and acts with actuators. Sensors go into the control system and actuators go out of the control system, hence we have input/output or simply I/O.
We did not invent I/O systems. They have been around for more than 50 years. We did, however, invent a very different way to accomplish the task of hooking up sensors and actuators to the computer control system. This is our story.
Right now, we want to hit some highlights and perhaps inspire you to read and watch more. If you have ever struggled to hook things up to a control system, we are confident that you will like Soft-I/O.
Soft-I/O frees you from the tedium and unbridles your creativity. If you can imagine a new machine or process, you have a powerful partner in Soft-I/O!
First Impressions
Probably the one thing that really knocks people back when they first work with Soft-I/O is configurability. Soft-I/O has a 25-pin I/O connector where the sensors and actuators are hooked up. With Soft-I/O, any pin can be configured for a specific mode. On the right is an image of the drag and drop interface in the Soft-I/O web management console. Flexibility is designed into the device. Any pin can be configured to be an input or an output. A pin can also be power or ground. That's a really big deal, and we will spend some time in other places talking about just why we did it and why it is so powerful.
Not only can any Soft-I/O pin be an input, output, power or ground, but the pins can cover a huge range of signal and power. So, we can drive a relay the size of a softball (often called a contactor) or we can hook up a thermocouple and precisely measure the millivolt-level signal that it produces. Or anywhere in between. All on the same pins of a single Soft-I/O module. There is literally only one Soft-I/O: only one part number!
The result is that a single part number Soft-I/O module can connect to virtually any sensor or actuator directly, thus vastly simplifying wiring and system integration.
Soft-Devices
Whizzing right along in our whirlwind tour of Soft-I/O, we look now at software innovations. Whereas configurability might be the sizzle, the software inside Soft-I/O is the substance that ties it all together.
Added to the flexibility of configurable I/O pins, Soft-I/O introduces the concept of a Soft-Device™
A Soft-Device is a configurable software component that turns a pin into a control system element. Some Soft-Devices are simple, like switches, lights or temperature sensors. Other Soft-Devices can be very complex, like temperature controllers. A steady stream of new Soft-Devices is coming out of XiO. Most are free, some are sold. With Soft-Devices, you can turn your Soft-I/O module into a dedicated controller or merely a node on your larger control system. It's entirely up to you.
Sequences
Soft-I/O Sequences let you use Soft-Devices in a meaningful way. Because Soft-Devices are control elements, like specific sensors or actuators, sequences tie them together and allow you to build an event-driven system without programming. Please click on the image to the right to see an example of the intuitive sequence setup screen.
A sump pump mechanism can be implemented using the Soft-I/O sequence engine:
- Step 1: Trigger the sequence when the high level sensor becomes true
- Step 2: Switch on the sump motor
- Step 3: Wait until the low level sensor becomes true
- Step 4: Wait 30 seconds
- Step 5: Verify that the low level sensor is still true
- Step 6: Switch off the sump motor
We set out to design a software structure that could deliver the algorithmic flexibility of a programming language but without the steep leaning--or forgetting--curve characteristic of a syntax-rich language. With its powerful watch system, you can tell what your module is doing without debugging tools. Sequences bring your Soft-I/O module to life!
Data Logging
We tried to build the coolest Data Logger, and some say that we did pretty well. Data logging is at the center of many critical industrial and experimental process monitoring. Soft-I/O's data logging goes beyond the simple storing of information that requires tedious analysis of large data sets. Soft-I/O includes the following functionality:
- a trigger that start the data logging, for example the temperature of a fermentation process exceeded 110 degrees.
- storing of samples that led up to led up to the trigger, for example, measuring the air flow up to the point when the trigger fired.
- storing a specified number of samples after the trigger event. Soft-I/O will give you the "before" and "after" of the event of interest.
- emailing the results. Soft-I/O saves its log files in a CSV format that can be opened in Excel®. Soft-I/O will email the file to you whenever an exception occurs. Now, that's the way to monitor your process!
Communications
What good is a control component if it can't communicate? Soft-I/O principally communicates over its Ethernet network interface. In addition, Soft-I/O can communicate over its I/O connector serially using all the popular electrical formats.
The default configuration and monitoring interface for Soft-I/O is its built-in web site.
For OEMs who want to integrate Soft-I/O with larger automation networks, we provide:
- a Telnet interface for rapid testing of commands and interactive monitoring and control;
- a TCP/IP interface using standard sockets and the same commands as the Telnet interface to automate interaction with entities defined in Soft-I/O;
- an optional Modbus slave interface to access a subset of the attributes and methods on Soft-I/O;
- an optional peer-to-peer network interface that eliminates the software chore of integrating multiple Soft-I/O modules; and
- an email interface to report status and alarm events.
Please follow us to answer the question, What is so unique about Soft-I/O?
