Varland Plating, a 60-employee electroplating company, has been using programmable logic controllers (PLCs) made by Opto22 for decades. They love their product line, and are too heavily invested to consider moving all of their control programming to another line. However, simply put, they find Opto22’s software for data visualization limiting: there are line graphs only, and the graph has to be configured and a runtime environment has to be running in order for data to be captured and charted.
In this session, Toby Varland, VP of Technology, will talk about how his team has begun moving data from Opto22 PLCs into InfluxDB, MQTT brokers, and more in an effort to expand capabilities – which is made possible by having Grafana as the primary data visualization platform for all this data. A sure sign of success: Varland’s production personnel love it, and constantly ask when they’ll have everything in the factory changed over.
- Toby Varland
VP of Technology at Varland Plating
Toby Varland
VP of Technology at Varland Plating
Toby Varland is Vice President of Technology at Varland Plating in Cincinnati, Ohio. Toby has spent his career in the electroplating industry, working through all aspects of factory floor automation from hardware selection and installation to PLC programming to HMI design. Currently, much of Toby's focus is integrating PLCs and hardware from Opto22 with other third-party products such as NodeRED, InfluxDB, and Grafana.