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Comment by herewulf

21 hours ago

Sounds fascinating! Other than the FOIA bit. Do you have a blog post or something with more detail about this work?

Naw, it's not really all that interesting. A SCADA system has a bunch of field devices it needs to talk to. Most SCADA software has some method of importing lists of device information and creating objects from it.

My engineer gives me a list of (for example) valve actuators on a site. I open that list in Emacs, manipulate it a bit, and then use it as input to a function I've written. That function generates a CSV file with things like tag name, Modbus ID, polling method, etc. that I can import into Wonderware. It's considerably faster and less error prone than manually creating and configuring hundreds of instances.

I say it's not interesting because most people in my position write little bits of code like this to automate the repetitive parts of our jobs. I just do it with elisp instead of Excel or Python.