The Truth About the Ignition Exchange

From releasing FactoryPacks with the initial launch of the Ignition Exchange, all the way through releasing our Geofence project before ICC 2021, including an Honorable Mention for Andrew Geiger at ICC 2020, Corso Systems has a lot of experience putting out resources on the Ignition Exchange.

Through the various releases we have learned a few truths about the Ignition Exchange, Inductive Automation in general, and how the whole process works.

Do Good Work

The first truth about the Ignition Exchange is they will not release or allow bad resources. Sure, you might question the overall need for some of the projects on the exchange, or find that some are too specific for your use cases—however, based on the testing process for the resources we have released, you can be sure that projects on the Exchange are relatively bug free.

For example, our Geofence resource: the initial implementation was thrown together at the start of the pandemic over an idle weekend. It was fully functional—you could create a shape on the map and detect whether you were inside of it or not—but it wasn’t fully tested.

Once it was uploaded to the Exchange, the testers at Inductive Automation found a bug. They found that after a handful of iterations selecting and de-selecting various shapes using the map and the dropdown, some of the text fields to disappeared entirely. This along with some other minor (yet hard to find unless you are REALLY testing) bugs were fixed and a new version released. After a couple of iterations we got to the point of testing a fresh deployment and found that if you only had one polygon shape on the map and nothing else created, it wouldn’t ever show that you were in the polygon.

These are all things we would have found in the wild if it was just thrown up onto the Exchange with no review process. To be quite honest the testing process for an Ignition Exchange resource was more involved than a lot of software on the market—which is a big relief.

Do Good Looking Work

To say Andrew Geiger is an amazing programmer is an understatement. His command of Ignition, Python, and anything Database related is unparalleled. To say he is a graphic designer is a gross exaggeration, per his own assessment on many occasions.

The major feedback he received on his Metatools resource was that he should invest some time in a GUI so that people had something to look at while they used it. For projects like the Ignition to Slack Integration—where there really isn’t an interface since it is all on the backend—this isn’t an issue. But for projects like Metatools, a slick interface is a good feature to have. For projects like FactoryPacks, it is a given that a good interface is a huge selling point.

If you submit something that looks straight out of a 2005 ”Your HMI can now run on Windows Vista!” campaign, then you will get notes that it needs improvement.

Andrew took the opinionated stance that the tool was a command line tool by its very nature so a GUI didn’t make sense, and only the wandering minds of folks at the Fat Rabbit after opening day at ICC 2022 will know if he could have gotten top billing instead of an Honorable Mention with a prettier interface. Looking through the Exchange to grab links for this post it would appear Andrew is one of the most prolific contributors to the Exchange who doesn’t work for Inductive Automation.

Aim Above the Low Hanging Fruit

Based on our project work in the mid to late 2010s and talking to customers, other integrators, and Inductive Automation, the FactoryPacks resource seemed like a no-brainer. We had converted FactoryTalk View to Ignition for customers using PlantPAX in their PLCs on many customer projects and it seemed like an easy win to release on the Exchange. We all assumed that we’d get some great conversations going, and that it would give a lot of people a tool to for an otherwise tedious and time consuming task. We thought it would spread like wildfire, and even talked it up at the Ignition Cross Industry Collective meeting before ICC 2019 and had a great response there.

As it actually turned out, we did have a lot of conversations, except instead of people excited to use the FactoryPacks resource, people wanted to share war stories of trying to build their own version of it. They also wanted insight into a few topics in our ICIC session related to Tag Groups and UDTs. This was still an awesome result and led to a lot of great discussion, but it fell short of this resource being as useful to people in the real world as we hoped.

We now understood that if the issue was really easy, or if people were already doing it themselves, then it might not be the best choice for an Exchange resource. We’ve seen this come around many times since releasing FactoryPacks. Many people have suggested ideas to extend FactoryPacks thinking that there’s a huge market need for it. Then they kick off development only for it to peter out a couple months later when they realize the people who need it are likely doing it themselves already.

That said, the offer still stands, if anyone needs FactoryPacks updated to include something useful for your facility please let us know and we can put some time into it. Otherwise we are focused on the next round of exciting Ignition Exchange Resources to be released!

Updated - 6/16/2022