Getting Started

System Requirements

The tables below show the system requirements for the proper installation and operation of the software. Keep in mind these are the recommended prerequisites for the basic installation - depending on your project, you may need different requirements.

Downloading and Installing FrameworX

We commend downloading our evaluation version to start exploring our software. You can do that by filling out the form here.

We offer a FREE TRIAL with:

• Two hours of resettable runtime

• Multiple demo projects to use, review, and learn from

• 500 communication points

• Access to all the features in the platform

• Access to all our standard communication protocols

• MQTT Broker

• OPC Client and Server

The Engineering Environment is enabled to edit projects for 30 days with no time restrictions. After the 30-day evaluation period, your project will open but with limited access to the entire project. Project Information access is enabled.

When you install FrameworX for the first time, just click Install. It takes less than a minute!

Managing and Running Solutions

When you first open the software, you'll find a list of your current solutions. By default, you'll find all of our demos installed. Before creating your own solution, we recommend exploring our demos!

For new users, we recommend starting with the Brewery Demo. In this solution, we’ve built a brewery line from scratch, using all of the main software features. At our training site, you’ll find a free course that explains how we did this, from creating a project to adding alarming capabilities. *Update with the demo information for v10*

To open a Solution, just select from the list and click "Run" to simply deploy it or "Edit" to take a look at how we created it. You can also double click the solution to load it.

It will take a minute to open the solution. Once it's successfully started, you'll find the following Welcome Window.

Creating a New Solution

If you want to create your own solution, simply click "New" in the Solution Manager.

Creating a new Solution consists of three phases. First, you must choose which version of the Product Family you'll use and click Next. The features included in your selection will be represented by the icons on the bottom of the page.

Then, you'll move , you must choose what kind of application you'll build. UPDATE IMAGE, there's a grammatical error 

Finally, add a title and a description and choose a location on your computer to install this solution (we install it inside the Documents folder, by default). You can choose a template for your solution here as well, but for this example, we won't select anything. When you're ready, simply click "Create New Solution". 

Creating a new solution may take a minute - once loading is complete, you'll see our Home Page, that contains all of the basic information for this solution.

In the homepage you can also change the Theme you'll be using: we offer five different options (Light, Dark, Indigo, Blue and Live). By default, Light will be selected. On the right side of the screen, you'll find the common steps to start exploring our platform, from DataExplorer to Runtime. We'll explore those basic features in this quick tutorial.

Data Explorer Tools

The DataExplorer tools allow you to easily perform data mining and monitoring from various data sources, including MQTT Brokers, OPC-UA, PLCs and SQL databases. Here, let's see how you can connect to our MQTT Simulator to browse its data.

Go to Data Explorer → MQTT Tools to start. You can connect to your own broker, if you wish, but our system has a native SpartkplugB MQTT Built-In Broker that you can use.

Out platform also offers a MQTT Publisher Simulator, that has customizable data being published. Simply click both of the green "start" buttons to start the Broker and Simulator.

Once you've done so, click Connect to see and browse the generated data.

If you have any PLCs in your network, you can automatically connect to browse its data structure.

Update with automatic creation of Data Templates (the alpha that has this feature isn't available yet). Select what you want and click "Map to Solution". Explain: Device Mapping or ExternalTags Source.

Creating a Unified Namespace and Tags

In the Unified Namespace section, you'll be able to define the data models you'll use in the solution. When building a new solution, a good practice is start by creating Data Templates. In this case, the SolarPanel data template will have already been created, since we exported it from the MQTT Simulator. You can also create manually or import from csv or other libraries.

Update with image of automatic creation of Data Templates (the alpha that has this feature isn't available yet). 

Once you have your Data Model, the next step would be to create tags and map it to a Device. This was already done automatically, but once again, you can do it manually if you wish. Here, you'll find the tag DeviceD1 has already been created, with the type "DataModel1", that contains all of the characteristics of the device in the MQTT Simulator.

Update with image of automatic creation of Tags (the alpha that has this feature isn't available yet). 

To create a New Tag, simply click the "New Item" option in the Tags menu.

Field Communication: Mapping Data to Devices

The next step is creating the connection with the field. For this, we offer over 50+ native communication protocols. 

When creating a new connection with the field, the first step is to create a Channel. Here, you can a instance of one protocol. You can have many channels connecting to the same protocol if you wish. Once you have a protocol defined, you can create a Node. Finally, you can create Points, which is where you map the data in your data model to the specific address on the device. This creation may be done by importing from csv or other libraries (check).

In this case, since we mapped the MQTT Simulator to the solution, the system already created everything automatically, as seen below. 

Update with image of automatic creation of everything (the alpha that has this feature isn't available yet). 

To showcase how the manual creation works, simply click to create a new Tag1 in the Points section as a "SolarPanel" type.

Once you do that, add it to Points table and map it to a specific Address. You can either type or browse the available data. Because we're using the MQTT in this example, you only need to map at the device level and the system will automatically read all of the properties associated with that device.

Creating a Simple Display with Symbols

Let's start by exploring the Draw Environment. To access, go to Displays → Draw, or simply click the Draw button at the top menu.

This will open the main Draw Environment. By default, the first page created will be the MainPage, where your main content should go. 

On the left side of the screen, you'll find all of the components you can use to build your display. They're categorized by different types of graphical components, such as icons, charts, navigation and symbols (incluindo high-performance graphics). You can also search for something specific in our library using the search input.

To add a component to your display, simply click and drag to the drawing environment. In this example, we'll grab a simple button from the Symbol library. If you double click the symbol, you'll open a popup box where you can map the component's properties to your tags. In this case, the button only has one property (IsPressed), which will map to the device status. To find a specific tag, you can either type "Tag." and it'll show you the options or click the three dots next to the input to navigate on your Asset Tree.

Show how to drag tags and create symbols automatically once I have the new Alpha!

One of the unique features of our platform is the ability to customize any symbol with a great number of dynamic properties. Those include custom Actions, Scripts, Visibility, Rotation, and more.

For this example, add a simple rectangle to the display and double click it to look at the available properties. For this example, I created a simple expression to change the fill color depending on the value.

You can create a new symbol combining those two components and save it into your Symbol Library. To do that, first break apart the button symbol and then select all parts and select "Create New Symbols with Select Elements". This gives you more flexibility to use our library as a base to create custom symbols that fit your industrial application.

Create a Real-Time Alarm

To test out the Alarming functionalities in the platform, let's create an alarm. First, on the UNS section, create a new Tag, named FilterAlarm, with the Type "Text".

On Alarms → Groups, you'll find some default groups created. 

On Alarms → Items, you'll need to create some items, as shown below. To create, simply click on directly on the first line of the table.

In the Draw Environment, search for AlarmWindow and drag it into the display.

Insert three buttons under the AlarmWindow object and give their respective names: “All”, “Warning”, “Critical”. You can change the button text in the Drawing Properties, on the right side of the screen.

Double-click on the buttons and configure the filters:

Create Trends

Let's create a Trend Legacy to show the real-time values.

On Unified Namespace → Data Templates, create a new template called Trend.

After you've done that, add the following lines to the table (just start typing on the first line of the table and click Enter to add it).

Name: Reference | Type: Reference
Name: Cursos | Type: Double
Name: pen | Type: Integer

Go to Unified Namespace and create a trend tag as shown below.

Finally, let's add it to the Display. Search for TrendChart and drag it into the display. Double click it to configure it as shown below.

Suggestions for this step: 

1. Create a Database and DataGrid
2. Reports
3. ExternalTags
4. More details on Runtime
5. Scripts

10. Licensing And Registration

To get the full capabilities of our platform and start building your real solutions, you'll need a License. The information about your license and the links to activate it can be found in the Solution Manager page. There you may choose between online and offline activation. You can learn more Licensing and Activation here.

Exploring More Features

With these ten steps, you've learned the basic on working with FrameworX and you're ready to continue your journey.

In this chapter, you'll find more basic information to get you started.

Once you're ready, we recommend you:

• Explore the User Guide, that goes into detail on each module.
• Take a look at our Solution Examples, that showcase different aspects and functionalities of the platform.

You can also schedule a introductory meeting with one of our onboarding specialists here.