Communication Driver Fundamentals

VTS collects information from industrial equipment through hardware input devices, displays the information graphically on a computer, and sends control signals back to hardware output devices to control the operation of the equipment. Computers and hardware input/output devices do not use the same protocol to communicate; therefore a data translator is required to provide communication between the devices. This is the role of a communication driver.

In VTS, communication drivers are in the form of a specialized tag type. Because each type, make, and model of I/O device uses a different communication protocol, many different communication driver tag types are required to provide the interface from these different I/O devices to the VTS software.

VTS ships with communication drivers for the following I/O devices:

•      Allen-Bradley PLCs,   Data Flow RTUs

•      Modicon RTUs,          Omron Host Link PLCs

•      OPC Clients,             Siemens S7 PLCs

•      … and more. Please refer to "VTS Developer's Guide: VTS I/O Device Driver Library".

Tag types can have unlimited instances, therefore many copies of the same or different drivers may run at the same time, providing communication between your PC and multiple I/O device drivers.