Course overview

This course is intended for application developers who have already started learning the basics of OPC UA. If you are new to Industry 4.0 and OPC UA, you may still be able to get a head-start with this course as the first few sections focus on introducing the OPC UA and its information model. For a more complete learning experience, you can take a look at our earlier course 'Practical Introduction to OPC UA - Part I' at https://kalycito.teachable.com/p/opc-ua-the-interoperability-standard-for-industrial-communication.

Both Part 1 and Part 2 courses share the concept of information modeling with OPC UA. While Part 1 of the course focuses on the key features of the OPC UA Client/Server communication such as,

1. Read Write services
2. Method calls
3. Subscription for data change

This course (Part 2) focuses on the key concepts and features of OPC UA such as,

1. Event Notifications
2. Historical Data Access
3. Alarms and Conditions

Rather than explaining the under-the-hood complexity behind each specification item, we have tried to strike a balance between covering as many use cases on one side while simplifying the technology for application developers on the other.

This course includes hands-on sessions by using sample applications based on the open source OPC UA stack open62541.

In addition to the open62541 OPC UA stack, all the other software components used in this course are available in open source and you do not need to spend on any software licenses.

Objectives of this course

Together with Part 1 and Part 2, the objective of this course is to equip application developers with,

1. Basics of OPC UA information modeling with a hands-on example
2. Step-by-step walk-through of client and server applications demonstrating the following OPC UA features:

• Event Notifications
• Historical Data Access
• Alarms and Conditions
• Develop your own applications based on OPC UA

What will you learn

At the end of this course, you will understand how to,

1. Compile a custom information model into an OPC UA server by using the Open Source open62541 stack as an example
2. Implement events in an OPC UA server and get event notifications in an OPC UA client application
3. Configure an OPC UA server to store historical data and access it from an OPC UA client application
4. Implement alarms and conditions in an OPC UA server and activate/acknowledge/confirm from an OPC UA client application

Required hardware and software

1. One PC/laptop with Ubuntu 18.04 Operating System is recommended
2. If you don't have a Linux environment to run the examples shown in this course, you should be able to use WSL 2.0 as well. We have a free course on WSL 2.0 which takes just 10 minutes, to get you started with WSL 2.0. Link: https://kalycito.teachable.com/p/tips-and-tricks-in-windows-subsystem-for-linux-wsl-2
3. Open source OPC UA stack based on the open62541 project
4. Open source OPC UA client based on the FreeOpcUa project