Integrating Ignition with Exciting Peripherals

Speakers

Travis Cox

Co-Director of Sales Engineering

Inductive Automation

Donald Bailey​​​​

Senior Digital Transformation Engineer

Gray Solutions

Ignition is based on open standards, is deployable anywhere, provides data to anyone, and can integrate with virtually any system or device. This allows you to leverage best-in-class technology with seamless integration to Ignition. Perspective and the native iOS and Android application is a perfect example of this. Ignition  enables people to extend their applications to a phone or tablet by leveraging the camera, GPS, NFC, Bluetooth LE, and other mobile tools. In this session, you’ll get some exciting use cases and live demos featuring one exciting OT peripheral and one very cool guest appearance you won’t want to miss!

Transcript:

00:00
Travis Cox: Hello, everybody. Hey, thank you. I'll take that. How y'all doing this afternoon? All right, well, I have an amazing and exciting session for y'all here today. The title... The marketing team wanted me to keep it pretty vague, so that's what we did. But it's, we're gonna be showing how we can integrate Ignition with some really exciting peripherals here today. So, of course, I am Travis Cox, Chief Technology Evangelist here. And throughout the years I've being Inductive Automation, I've always been excited to just play with new technology. Of course, when people ask, "Can Ignition get connected with this or do that?" I'm the first one that says, "Of course, let's just go figure out how to make this happen." So that's really what this session's all about is how we can just solve customers' pain points and leverage Ignition to do that.

00:56
Travis Cox: So, we're gonna look at a couple of things today. First is just why Ignition's so freaking awesome. We're gonna look at that, and of course, interoperability, just the keys about interoperability with Ignition and why it's so important out there. And then we have two exciting demonstrations for you here today that show just that with some pretty cool technology that has some pretty big impactful benefits for customers. So let's first start before we get into those demos. Why is Ignition so awesome? So, I wanted to bring the attention back to our mission statement because the mission statement really says a lot about the company's philosophy, what we are here to do. And that is to create industrial software that empowers you to turn great ideas into reality by removing all technological and economic obstacles. So simply put, it's to empower you to accomplish your goals, right?

01:54
Travis Cox: And you saw with [Ignition] 8.3, all the new features that are gonna help you do more and ultimately solve pain points for customers. That's the goal around Ignition. And of course, the motto, "Dream It. Do It." I could tell you that throughout my career at Inductive, not only with customers, but even with inside of our company, whenever there's a potential challenge or problem that we wanna solve, I'm the first one to say, "Let's go build it with Ignition." And we've actually used Ignition house for a lot of cool things, and I'll mention that in a moment. But one of the main reasons that Ignition's so awesome is that from the beginning, we chose it to be a platform. And being a platform, there's some important tenets about that, that allow for all these amazing solutions to be built out, right?

02:42
Travis Cox: First and foremost, that it's based on open standards. We don't want things proprietary, locked down, we talked about that earlier, but it is based on standards, open standards. That right there means interoperability. But it also has lot has to have lots of connectivity options. And over the years, we've added, added a lot of options to Ignition from our PLC drivers, of course, the OPC UA, MQTT, REST, our AWS and Azure connectors of course MongoDB. And now with 8.3, Kafka. And there's just gonna be a plethora of more connectors that will be looking at. And the idea of having all the connectors is so that you can use what makes the most sense for you and put together systems in unique ways.

03:24
Travis Cox: Platform independence is also really important, of course, with that, because then you're not locked down to how you wanna deploy it, where you want it to go. You can deploy it anywhere in your infrastructure, how you want to deploy it. And I think that's an important part of just why it could be anywhere and do anything.

03:42
Travis Cox: And the last part is extensibility. This, I can't stress enough. We have two, there's a lot of tools Ignition, but there's two major ways that, you know, if it's not built into Ignition, that we can ultimately solve it, solve a problem, and that's through Python and the module SDK. So with Python, there's lots of options to bring in other Python libraries, write some code. Not everybody wants to write code, but there's that ability is there. We can go further. It's a variable integrated within Ignition. But the module SDK gives us that freedom that if we want to, if we have the will and the way and we wanna solve it, we can do that, right?

04:21
Travis Cox: So these are the reasons that we chose... With Ignition being a platform that just allows us to innovate and to not ask for permission. We at Inductive Automation wanna build everything, but we can't build everything. But if we have, if we continue making the best platform, adding great features, and have it, have the ability for you to go and innovate and add on top of that, now you have the best of all the worlds. Now, not only do you have to have a good technology, but you have to have an ecosystem. And that's the thing that I love the most. I love being here and talking with customers and partners and integrators and everybody who has these amazing ideas. Because this ecosystem, this large ecosystem that we have, is what really contributes to generating all these amazing, innovative ideas.

05:11
Travis Cox: And one of the demos that we're gonna do today was just inspired by somebody who had an idea said, "Hey, can we, let's talk about this. Can we do this?" And sure enough, "Of course we can, let's go, and let's go figure it out." Also, that one thing that we've done a lot to contribute to encourage contribution or collaboration is by building a lot of tools for the community. So y'all have used the forum, our Ignition Exchange, where we can freely share resources with each other, the Ignition ideas [portal] where you can share ideas about what you want the software to do in the future and vote those ideas up. And we're taking a lot of those off, of course, with looks like 8.3, and we also have an open-source module development community called the Ignition Module Development Community.

06:00
Travis Cox: And all of these are to just encourage that collaboration and that innovation that we can do on top of Ignition. So for me, being a platform is what really leads to this interoperability and the ecosystem that we have. Because, again, if you have the idea there, and you have the knowledge around Ignition, you can go and build just about anything you want. I have never once said "no" to something. So in terms of building everything Ignition's really limitless, right? There's lots of possibilities that we can build. HMI/SCADA, of course, right? MES. IIoT applications. I don't know if you guys checked out the SCADA Arcade. That's built on Ignition, it's pretty cool, right? Games that are in Ignition. We actually have built our CRM in Inductive Automation with Ignition from the very beginning.

06:56
Travis Cox: And that has evolved over the years. And it's been a great tool for us because we can change it, adapt it, and make it fully customized the way that we want it. We have a Lobby Sign-In if you come to our office. So Sign-In, that's a Perspective application on a tablet where you'll print out your badge. We've, I don't know if you, if anybody, has played around with License Portal, but it's a portal that we built that is out there for all of you. If you want access to it, contact your sales person where you can manage your licenses and you can see what's going on in there and check and work with that. That's simply just a Perspective application contacting to a REST API that we have provides that information.

07:38
Travis Cox: Home automation systems. I'm a big home automation enthusiast. Do we have others in the room? All right. I love it. So that's, it's easy. We can go, I'm connecting to my Z-Wave and ZigBee devices at home. I am connected to a bunch of REST APIs from things like REST and Ring and, or sorry, Nest and Ring and all sorts of different systems to bring it all together into that single pane of glass, Ignition. In fact, I have a tablet for my boys for the, like the lighting control of the room, right? To set the ambiance when we watch movies. So it's fun. You can do all these cool things with Ignition as well as just build IT applications, database applications, and the list continues to go on and on and on. Hopefully get the kind of idea that we're setting forth here. Lots of options for what is possible.

08:24
Travis Cox: So I think for me, what I've tried to instill in a lot of people when I work... If you get on a call with me and we're talking about problems that are out there, it's really you need... With Ignition, I have the confidence to say, "Yes." I know it. I know it like the back of my hand. I know what it can do. So if somebody ever asks, you know, "What if I want to connect to something that Ignition doesn't already support out of the box? What if I need a new feature?" Or "What if I need a new visualization component?" Something that is not there already. Well, that's okay, there's no problem. There is a path forward. Now, I'm not suggesting everybody here go and build a module or go write a lot of Python code.

09:06
Travis Cox: But the point is that there is a path forward. Through talking to us and giving us ideas of where we can... How we can... What we can do in Ignition and shape the future of Ignition to you building cool modules and providing solutions for your customers. There is always a path forward, right? We can say confidently, "Yes." And that you walk away from anything from this session. That's the one thing that I think is really, really important. And as you can see in the Discover Gallery and a lot of projects, there's been a ton of innovation just because of this fact.

09:41
Travis Cox: So today I wanna show two cool examples of this. And the first example was one that came to me from an integrator in Canada. They had asked about particular technology, they got us hooked up with the vendor and they said, "Hey, can... Is this possible? Can we do you know this with Ignition?" And it was a slam dunk. It was really easy. And that was using Apple Vision Pro. So I don't know if you guys have played around with it yet. But the era of spatial computing, it is pretty incredible of what's possible. So the customer came to us about a use case around operational, creating dashboards and HMIs with this. And the idea of being able to seamlessly blend the digital world, the HMI, if you will, with the physical space. That's what this can really bring. So that Virtual Control Room, they had a few different use cases that they wanted to solve and they wanted somebody at home to have, to turn their home office into that Virtual Control Room where you'd have lots of TVs on a wall to have lots of applications up where you can see that.

10:49
Travis Cox: And that's a perfect use case for it. And then the other is like a hands-free HMI, anywhere in the plant to be able to go out there and have the HMI up, but be able to still see and work with the process. Those are two really cool use cases. Another one, of course, that they wanna do is actually have their users run through real-life scenarios or simulations within this. And that's for training, get new people understanding different scenarios and seeing how they can solve that. So here's the cool thing. When they ask the question, it's like, look, Perspective's native HTML5. Of course it can run on Apple Vision Pro. Not only that, the Apple Vision Pro runs all iOS apps and the Perspective native app runs natively on that. So we are gonna work, our development team's gonna work on building a deeper integration with visionOS, and that is to do things like a one click to open up all the different displays in that physical space as well as using gestures because you have good gesture support. So would you all like to see it?

11:56
Audience: Yeah.

11:56
Travis Cox: All right.

12:01
Travis Cox: So, let me put this on here. All right, let me get it on and we're gonna project it here on the back screen. But word of caution, if anybody has the motion sickness, you may want to look away for a little bit. And let me close this over here. All right, can y'all see what I'm seeing?

12:32
Audience: Yeah.

12:33
Travis Cox: Woo. All right, so the first part of my stress is good because I can actually see it behind me. So that's amazing. All right. Because you know live demos, right? I've always done live demos and you never know. Lots of variables. All right, let's bring up... So are you still seeing me? All right, so guess what? Apple Vision Pro, I said, first of all, Perspective HTML5, right? So that means if I open Safari, look at there is our beautiful demo project. And let's go to... I don't know, our data center project. Have you all seen our online demo project? So it's right in front of me, but I'm gonna move it over you guys right there. And we can make it maybe a little bit bigger. So there's my... There's one. Now I'm not gonna open 20 of these for you guys, but there's one HMI, let's now go to that Perspective app. There's our Perspective app. I'm gonna put it right there. Actually, we're gonna go right here and I'll show you why. So we're gonna open that one and let's go to a different demo project. And putting my fingers together is how we actually click around. So let's go to our building management system.

14:04
Travis Cox: And we're gonna go to our floors. So this is actually our live... A live view of our building in terms of the temperature and all that. So there's my cool little example of my HMIs that are in physical space. Now, like I said, what's really cool is that it is in the physical space. And so like if I, you know, it stays there, right? If I walk through it, it's pretty cool. Oh yeah, look at that and we're gonna, we'll go back, but I can have as many of these displays as I want open. And I can still see all of you. I can still do my work, I can still have this, but from a virtual control room, from an HMI, from a simulation perspective, I think this is a pretty cool technology. What do you think?

14:47
Travis Cox: Yeah.

14:54
Travis Cox: All right, so let's make sure that nobody gets sick in this room and let's stop mirroring there. Okay, so that was our first demo. If you thought that was pretty cool, wait for the second one. Now, of course, for that second one, I needed some help with this one. This was kind of fortuitous when I was doing this session or at least when I got introduced to Apple Vision Pro. I was like, "Man, I'd really like to do a session at the conference about cool gadgets. It'd be kind of fun." And then somebody, one of our integrators, he emails me and says, "Hey, I got... I'd done this cool integration with Ignition, we should show it off somehow." And I said, "Man, that's perfect timing. Let's do that." So let's welcome out Donald Bailey, Senior Digital Transformation Engineer from Gray Solutions.

15:48
Donald Bailey: Thank you, Travis. How are you guys doing? A little after lunch, what, downtime here, right? So Travis, you're always showing us and wowing us some really cool gadgets and things. Definitely a tough act to follow. But today, I think I got you beat.

16:07
Travis Cox: But before we do, let's make sure we get this ah, yeah, that's displayed on the... There we go.

16:13
Donald Bailey: There we go.

16:13
Travis Cox: There we go.

16:15
Donald Bailey: All right, cool. Alright. So I'm Donald Bailey. I'm a Senior Digital Transformation Engineer with Gray Solutions. Throughout my career, I have had a passion for giving our customers Digital Transformation solutions that help with operator effectiveness and situational awareness to solve their most challenging issues. And Gray Solutions shares that passion. We are a company that lets curiosity lead and we never stop asking, "What if?" And that attitude allows us to say, "We can," in an industry where sometimes you often get, "We can't." So we take after Travis here and well... Hi, Spot, how are you? Oh, it's nice to see you too. Can you say hi to the crowd?

17:14
Travis Cox: Welcome Spot, everybody.

17:21
Donald Bailey: So, Spot, what are you doing here? You have something you wanna show us back here?

17:36
Travis Cox: I wonder what's under there, man?

17:37
Donald Bailey: Yeah. I don't know. I guess we're about to find out.

17:41
Travis Cox: The suspense is killing me.

17:44
Donald Bailey: Whoa. It's Hawt Spot. So I think we should wake her up and introduce her to you guys and "can" starts here. So as she's doing her thing here, what you may notice is this isn't PowerPoint, this is Perspective. Everything you see up here in this demonstration is done through Perspective with Ignition as the backbone. And we'll talk a little bit more about how we did that later. When Travis clicked that button, he started an event-driven instruction to send the robot out front and have a little fun with us. So everybody say, "Hi."

18:34
Speaker 2: Hi.

18:35
Donald Bailey: Oh wow. That's a hot crowd out there, right? Alright, so everybody smile, we're gonna take another picture. There you go. Alright. So, yeah, you're right, Hawt Spot. It is a tough crowd to look at sometimes, but lots of fun. No less.

19:06
Travis Cox: All right, go ahead. Good info.

19:07
Donald Bailey: Alright, so let's talk a little bit about these robots. These are the autonomous robots from Boston Dynamics. They're fully autonomous, agile. They can go virtually anywhere a person can. They avoid obstacles, recover from slips and falls, they can even climb stairs and go downstairs. Sometimes they fall downstairs, but we try not to let that happen. They'll have about 90 minutes of run time and lots of sensors and integration that can go with them. So some of the things you see here today, this is Spot CAM. It's a 4K camera that also has thermal imaging, as you just saw. It can rotate 360 degrees. It can play sounds and do all sorts of other kind of visual analytics and diagnostics that you may want it to do.

20:00
Donald Bailey: This on the back is a LiDAR system that gives you a very broad range to see what's going on from a robot's perspective and the environment around them. And we'll see a little bit about what that produces later. And there are some other sensors too. One that we don't have currently but is available is for acoustical detection of gas leaks and things like that. Now, over here on Spot, you have the fully mobile arm that has 6 degrees of freedom, about a 1 meter reach, can pick up 11 pounds, can drag 25 and has all sorts of neat things, including a camera in the middle. Say, "Hi." Alright, so we're gonna go ahead and send these back, let them take a rest for a minute and talk about how we can integrate robots into your workflow. The next button down there.

21:05
Travis Cox: Got it. I gotta control this thing here.

21:09
Donald Bailey: It's a bad part about doing it in Perspective, no clicker. So how do you integrate your robots into your workflow? We often encounter customers with legacy systems, could be old, all the way up, with a combination of new technology as well. We have workforces that are either limited resources available to them. Maybe it's high demand. Maybe it's an aging workforce. And we could have conditions at a site that are maybe not the best for humans to habitate or to work in.

21:49
Donald Bailey: So where do these robots fit in, these peripherals, if you will? They give you an ability to go out, have repeatable, consistent inspections. They can read gauges, they can do all sorts of things, and all that information comes back digitally, and you can actually do something with it. You can do advanced, maybe, picture analytics on that, to get information out of that and record it into history. It puts information at the fingertips of those people who need it to keep your operations running. It augments our workforce. It allows jobs, like routine inspections, things like that, to be done by something that can go out and do it whenever you want it to go do it. You don't have to spend human power and time to go do that. And then you can focus those resources on more high-value things that can really bring value to your company. And safe conditions. These can go just about anywhere a human can. And as such, they can go in tunnels, they can go over uneven terrain, in and around things that may not be the best for humans to go through. And so you take the human out of the equation and increase your safety barrier there.

23:27
Donald Bailey: So we're gonna have Hawt Spot go and actually perform an inspection of the stage. And so you may be asking, as we go through this — go to the next slide — "Where do Ignition and Gray Solutions fit into this equation?" In learning about Spot and what Boston Dynamics has provided, we started asking, "Well, okay, this is great technology, and Boston Dynamics has done a fantastic job of putting together all the stuff around it to make this work, but how can we extend that? How can we make it event-driven so that we can tell it to go do something versus just scheduling it to go do it on its own, whenever?" And that led us to ask, "What if? What if we wrap the Spot SDK that Boston Dynamics provides in a web service and leverage the rapid development and open flexibility of Ignition to build this prototype?" And you kinda see it. The architecture back there, it's just basic Ignition. I've got a REST web server in the middle, and that runs the SDK that talks to the dog. Go to FETCH.

24:52
Donald Bailey: So I talked about the LiDAR earlier. And here, you see a map of this stage. This is what Hawt Spot sees. This is all a point map of everything that it did. Go to the second screen there real quick. This is a close-up. You can see the path that it took, and you can even see when we recorded this, there are people standing there. You can see the people standing. So Travis, it looks like it's telling us we've got a problem. Oh wow. This is not cold water. That looks pretty hot. "Hey, Spot. Can you come out here and take care of that for us, please?" Thank you. So as Spot comes and takes care of this, I'll go back to this real quick and go to this slide. And as you see here, we've got a picture of just the stage area. You can see a lot of detail, the curve walls on the side, everything like that, but these are the three inspection points. So Mr. cameraman over there and some of the crowd in that area. A picture of the clock telling me how long I can or can't talk. And then finally, the picture of the bottle that you saw earlier. That ought to do it. Great job, Spot. Let's give him a hand.

27:02
Donald Bailey: So, as Travis said earlier, we don't have the attitude of "Can't." We like to say, "Yeah, we can do that. We'll figure it out. We'll make it work." And with Ignition, this is our breakthrough. This is what can make us find that new technology, that new innovation, and bringing the future to today, and that's what Gray Solutions is all about. Now, I'd be remiss if I didn't say thank you to a couple of other people who have really been instrumental in helping us get this together. Sam [Janes], Anya [Deaton], our dog whisperers.

27:48
Donald Bailey: Everything you saw Hawt Spot do today was done through Ignition. Anya was backstage as a safety precaution, just in case something went wrong, to take control of the robot. We never want to operate these without some sort of safety protocol in the background to stop it when things may not work right. So thank you, Sam and Anya.

28:18
Donald Bailey: And that is where curiosity led.

28:21
Travis Cox: Thank you so much, Donald, for that. Let's give him another round of applause, please.

28:30
Donald Bailey: Should we bring our robots back out and let them give a bow?

28:32
Travis Cox: Let's do that.

28:38
Donald Bailey: I'm gonna let Anya drive her this time.

28:54
Travis Cox: While these are coming up here, these dogs will be out in the hallway after the session today. If you guys wanna interact with them, go up and ask questions from the dog whisperers, about what they can do. I really appreciate Donald and the team coming here to show us this amazing stuff. So one more round of applause, everybody, please.

29:14
Donald Bailey: Thank you. Spot, give 'em a bow. Sometimes they act a little funny.

29:24
Travis Cox: So hopefully... Oh, look at this. Oh yeah. Oh yeah.

29:52
Donald Bailey: Thank you, Spot.

29:53
Travis Cox: So as you can see here with these two examples, I hope that all of you got a little inspired today. Honestly, never say no. There's a will, there's a way. We could build any kind of solution, and there's just amazing stuff that we can do and challenges that we can solve for our customers. And I just love this community because we get to see this cool stuff all the time. Thank you so much. And that's it. So if you have any questions, we're here.

30:24
Travis Cox: So there goes... We have some mic runners. If you have any questions, please hold up your hand, and we will get to you. Alright, there's one down here.

30:34
Audience Member 1: A quick question. Just, what was your time on implementation? So kinda walk us through your process of, like, you had an idea, and then how long did it take you to bring it to fruition?

30:44
Travis Cox: We did it yesterday. Really. No.

30:53
Donald Bailey: So for this project, what you saw in front of you probably took about three months total calendar time to put together, make it work, and do the integration. A lot of testing with the SDK, a lot of learning the SDK, for one, because it was new to all of us here. And so once we got that done, the Ignition part was easy. We just had to program the REST APIs to do that.

31:26
Travis Cox: There's a lot of... Their SDK has a lot of functionality. It's pretty expensive. So bringing that all in, integrate that with Ignition. Once it was figured, that part's pretty easy to do. Yeah.

31:37
Donald Bailey: And we have plans for the future on that as well.

31:41
Travis Cox: Absolutely. Other questions? Come on. Don't be shy. Right there.

31:54
Audience Member 2: Hey, Travis. So I understand you're into home automation.

31:56
Travis Cox: I am.

31:57
Audience Member 2: So I've been doing it, this stuff also since the '80s, before it was called home automation. So there are some technologies out there. Do you have a name for Insteon? That was a joke.

32:08
Travis Cox: Do I have a...

32:09
Audience Member 2: Insteon.

32:09
Travis Cox: No.

32:09
Audience Member 2: When you say never say no.

32:11
Travis Cox: No. We can bring it in... We can bring everything in. Come on. Over there.

32:23
Audience Member 3: So I actually had two just quick questions for you. And they don't necessarily relate to this, but I'm hoping you're a good one to ask. Do you guys have plans to integrate to Python 3 and be able to leverage all the libraries in Python 3?

32:36
Travis Cox: Ooh, the infamous question.

32:42
Travis Cox: So that question gets asked a lot. There's a gentleman over here in the right. Carl [Gould, Inductive Automation CTO]? Yeah, he can raise his hand. You can just go, say hi to him and go talk to him and plead your case. But no, we've been, of course, looking at being able to... Whether it's Python 3 or other implementations, bring that into Ignition. There is some work that have to be done in order for that to happen. But we do wanna go somewhere. Just don't have clear plans as to what that is. The Jython 3 spec is, I don't think, anywhere near ready for bringing it into Ignition. But go talk to that guy over there.

33:17
Audience Member 3: No, I appreciate that. The only other question I had was the Perspective app, cameras, GPS function, everything like that, is there any plans or even possibility to leverage that from the browser side rather than having to use the Perspective app?

33:34
Travis Cox: Well, so some of that can be in the browser. You can... Like uploading files and stuff. What the browser does support itself. That's also why we built Workstation, though. So Workstation as a wrapper around that, the browser is embedded inside of it, and allows us to get access to the OS so that we could integrate with things like... We don't have it yet. Integrating with the... Being able to work with the local file system, talk to serial devices or bluetooth devices, those kind of things. We would love to do that. Like, native apps for iOS and Android, they do get access to those sensors, that's there, because their apps are hooked into that kind of stuff. So with browsers, we get what browsers give us. And I think GPS is there in some capacity, but other things, we don't necessarily get. Yeah. Good questions. Question over there?

34:26
Audience Member 4: The images from Spot, or that Spot captured into Ignition. One, how did you do that? And two, are you doing any analysis on it, like gauge readings and things like that?

34:39
Donald Bailey: So right now, we're not doing any analysis on them. We're just taking the pictures and bringing them in. Everything you saw came from the robot. And basically, there's an SDK that allows me just to say, go point this camera somewhere, take the picture, and save the file to my laptop or wherever I wanna save it, and that's what we did. And so once I did that, I used... What is it? A web service or something...

35:06
Travis Cox: Web Dev?

35:06
Donald Bailey: Web... Yeah. That allowed me to create the path for it, and it always knew where those pictures were.

35:16
Travis Cox: Down there.

35:19
Audience Member 5: You showed support for visionOS as a VR solution. Is there any plans to support the Meta Quest as a more cost-effective solution?

35:30
Travis Cox: Yeah, I totally forgot. [Inductive Automation Chief Solutions Architect] Kevin McCluskey will get mad at me. 'Cause he's like, "We don't want people just to know that it works only on iOS." So we have a Quest too here, a Quest as well. It does work there. It has to be... The app has to be side-loaded though. That's the only problem right now on there. But it does function... And of course, Perspective being a browser, it does work on Quest. Now, deeper integration, like with visionOS, we could have that deep integration with the gestures and the actual addition to the app where we can open up multiple frames and specify where we want those to go. We are gonna be working on that. And I think we'll be seeing what we can do here as well so that there are just more options for people to easily open it up and get access. Yep. Question over here.

36:15
Audience Member 2: So I know I have a serious question since what the question over there was outside the scope of this. UDTs. I'm assuming you use some UDTs in this whole process with today or not? But my question is more around UDTs and protecting intellectual IP. Right now, UDTs are not encrypted or anything, so anyone... If I'm an integrator and I install something for someone that has a UDT I have my team spends a month on. I can't protect it. They have access to the source code, and they can just post it to your forums and that and give away something my team worked on. Is there any thoughts on protecting that stuff in the future?

36:58
Travis Cox: It's a very tricky question to answer, because Ignition, fundamentally, is designed to be a platform that is open like that, that has designer included, that customers can get access to. So when you talk about restricting those parts, the config, obviously, protect the IP that makes a lot of sense, it's the ways that which we could potentially go about that in the future would be maybe through a module adding resources to Ignition, and that could be read-only, those kind of ideas where we're looking. But we would still like to have the bulk of that... It's not like you're gonna go and say, "Oh, now let's make this whole thing encrypted where nobody can get into the server at all." We still want the customer to be able to manage a server and add and do what they need to do, but also have modules that provide the protected IP parts of the system. So that's the idea. Not quite there yet, but that's the idea. Right there.

38:02
Audience Member 6: What was the application that you solved with the dog robots?

38:10
Donald Bailey: So the use case that originally came out, that sparked the idea, is a customer wanting to move samples around. And it's something that you don't necessarily have a schedule when that happens, potentially. So you wanna be able to deploy the dog at will: go pick up something, bring it back. There are plenty of other use cases like that. For instance, let's say in the future, you have some alarm somewhere, maybe you've got the acoustical sensor on the back, got a future update to it that will allow it to look at bearing noise and stuff like that, you could deploy the dog to go out, do an inspection on demand, get that data and send it back to the guy at the console to do something about it, or dispatch maintenance.

39:05
Audience Member 6: Is that first customer actually using these dogs and to get those samples?

39:09
Donald Bailey: Absolutely.

39:11
Travis Cox: It's all about being able to have that single pane of glass for the operators. The folks like Sam and Anya here are trained to work with this. Not every operator out there is going to be trained. So when you can create the missions and have that safe environment established, being able to not only dispatch but to get information so that we can pull it back in system, have that one interface as well as to do alarms and things that are already established within the control system. We're not having separate disparate systems here, pulling it all together. That's really the most important use case. That's what customers want. A question over there.

39:52
Audience Member 7: Great demonstration, by the way. Fantastic. Ballpark figure, how much are the dogs?

40:00
Donald Bailey: Sam, I'll let you...

40:04
Sam Janes: Probably about $250,000 to $300,000.

40:08
Donald Bailey: Hold on.

40:10
Sam Janes: You can put about $250-300 [thousand] for one of these installs.

40:16
Travis Cox: There's just a little bit of money up here, a little bit. Especially when they got shipped to the office, and I was responsible for it.

40:26
Donald Bailey: Yeah.

40:30
Travis Cox: Any other questions? There's one up there. Thank you for pointing 'cause it's hard to see up there.

40:41
Audience Member 8: Now, I have two questions. One is, do they follow the three laws?

40:47
Travis Cox: I hope so.

40:47
Donald Bailey: Yes. Yes, they do. Provided they got them all.

40:50
Travis Cox: They do.

40:50
Donald Bailey: Boston Dynamics sees to that.

40:52
Audience Member 8: Okay. Now, you're covered underneath State Farm, or GEICO?

40:58
Donald Bailey: Well, I can't answer that.

41:01
Donald Bailey: Lords of London maybe?

41:02
Donald Bailey: Yeah.

41:08
Travis Cox: I see. Any other questions? Cool. Oh, there's one back there.

41:21
Audience Member 9: Great demonstration. Thank you. Is it possible to take the video stream from the dog and put that right into the vision system that you had.

41:35
Donald Bailey: So you can't stream it directly because of all of the I-frame things with HTML, but there is an SDK portion that will allow you to capture video, and I believe there's one that will actually allow you to capture that stream and pull it in. It's not something we've explored yet, but there's... Like you said, there's a lot of capabilities there. I know I can capture video and audio, for that matter, and save it directly to my laptop.

42:09
Audience Member 9: Thank you.

42:09
Travis Cox: Yeah. It does... I think you can't open in a separate tab and have that streaming there next to it, but there's just the core's restrictions that doesn't allow it to go inside of it and not inline frame, unfortunately. There's another one over... Oh, there was one over there. I'm gonna do that one and then we'll come over to you.

42:27
Donald Bailey: Okay.

42:30
Audience Member 10: So accessing the Perspective browser would remove your ability to scan barcodes. Do you guys have the interest and expanding into the augmented reality space, allowing you to actually interact with the environment, 'cause the browser, I don't believe, uses the tools to do that.

42:46
Travis Cox: Well, I could tell you. I don't... There's, certainly, no concrete plans, but that is a target of ours is to figure out what more we can do with devices. Like the visionOS, what more we can do with that. We'll start with our native app and add some easy functionality there, but get the feedback and see where it can go. So that would be awesome, to have more direct integration. So nothing on the road quite yet.

43:12
Audience Member 11: So this is more about the SDK itself. Is that something that's hosted locally on your network? And if the robots are delicate enough, is there a reason why we didn't have one of those robots rip Travis' shirt off on stage for the 10-year anniversary?

43:27
Donald Bailey: So again, going back to the three laws, we don't wanna do that to Travis. If we miss, Travis could get hurt. And we don't want that. So Travis, you're welcome. The SDK, currently I'm running in a Docker image on my laptop. Long-term, you could run it just like we're doing it now, on a server, some image in the cloud even. The SDK is available from Boston Dynamics. You can go look at it if you want.

44:00
Travis Cox: The SDK is a Google part our stream service. So the idea... Right now, they have a lot of... They have Python implementations. And we just simply wrapped up in REST API. However, the long-term plan would be to help them build the module that integrates directly with the SDK, and so that stuff's added to Ignition without having to write any code or any of that kind of stuff, have it directly in part of Ignition. So maybe like Event Streams. And the cool stuff coming to 8.3 we can hook it into those systems. Alright, well, that is the end of our time. Appreciate it. Thank you so much.