VIGO is a suite of interrelated PC applications and utilities, which enables designers, and commissioning and maintenance engineers to configure, monitor and debug P-NET enabled systems. At its heart is the mechanism to enable communication between devices connected to P-NET (and other standards), and applications running in a PC. Such PC applications communicate internally by means of what is known as OLE2 Automation (Object Linking and Embedding), which is part of operating systems based on Microsoft Windows.
VIGO is so powerful and versatile, that it is an essential tool when developing P-NET systems. As such, it is provided with a free licence when used with a PC/P-NET interface from PROCES-DATA.
The main user interface provides the means to build up the structure of a system using a variety of known and registered devices, in a tree structure. For example, if a cluster of 600 series devices is to be used, it is merely a matter of picking each node device type from a list and including it in the tree. Since the structure of each node device is known, VIGO knows how to access every register and what data type it contains. VIGO doesn’t know at this stage what the node address of each device is, or the name the user would like to call each device. This is achieved by using a property window for each device, where the user just fills in the required information. This procedure is carried out to include all nodes that will form the complete system, including 600 series clusters, other controllers and I/O nodes from other series, and any PCs.