[00:00] Hello everyone! In this video, we’re going to learn how to configure N3uron’s OPC UA Server to share data coming from any source with external OPC UA clients. We’ll start by navigating to the Real-time screen, where we can view the data model that we’ll expose via the OPC UA Server. This model represents a 10MW photovoltaic plant, consisting of ten power stations, each with two inverters, a weather station, and various KPIs calculated by N3uron to track the plant’s overall performance. Now, we’ll begin by creating a new instance of the module. Head over to the Config tab, select “Modules,” and click on “New Module”. For clarity, give it a name like “OpcUaServer”, then set the module type to “OpcUaServer” and save the configuration.

[01:00] Next, click on the newly created module instance in the Modules list under the Explorer section. Now, let’s configure the Network Interface. Select the network interface card that will manage incoming connections. In the TCP Port field, you can either keep the default value of 3005 or choose a port between 1 and 65535. Just make sure the port is not being used by any other application. Enter one or more alternate hosts separated by commas in the Alternate Host field, or leave it empty as default. If your server is behind a firewall, enter its public IP address to ensure clients authenticate successfully during the initial handshake. You can enable anonymous user authentication in the next field if needed, though it’s typically disabled by default for obvious security reasons and is mainly used during commissioning. In the next field, you also have the option to disable server discovery, if needed, to restrict the server’s visibility on the network.

[02:02] Next, configure the Security settings. While non-secure access allows clients to connect without a security policy, we strongly recommend avoiding this for better security. Instead, select a security policy that supports encrypted communication. We suggest selecting the default option, Basic256Sha256 with Sign and Encrypt to ensure a more secure connection. Next, configure the Server settings. You can choose a tag name separator or leave it at the default. Also, select the data type for number tags, either float or double, and set the maximum number of connections. If your application requires specific tag properties, such as engineering units, you can enable the Include Tag Properties option. In this case, I will leave it set to the default value. In the Server Capabilities section, set the maximum number of sessions and the minimum supported sample rate, which defines how frequently tag events are updated.

[03:00] Now, let’s navigate to the Store and Forward settings. When this option is enabled, data from remote nodes is stored if no OPC clients are active, pausing transmission. Data transmission will resume as soon as a client starts consuming data. The buffer size determines the maximum number of events to store before halting the source link. We can add an additional endpoint, where we’ll configure a separate network interface for incoming connections, including its security policies, just as we did with the primary endpoint. This is necessary when using redundancy, as the backup node will have a different network interface than the one configured for the primary endpoint. Before moving to the Access settings, I will create a new role and user specifically for the OPC UA Server instead of using the default ones. Once the role and user are created, we’ll move to the Access settings.

[04:14] Now, let’s configure the access permissions. I will grant only Tag permissions in this example and apply an Include filter to expose the entire data model to clients accessing with the OPC UA role. Remember, at least one Include filter is required, though you can also add Exclude filters to refine what is exposed. For more advanced filtering options, you can use regular expressions. We will save the Methods settings without creating any, as this will be covered in a later video. Let’s move on to connecting an OPC UA client to the server. In this case, we’ll use the UAExpert client. I’ll configure the connection by entering the server’s IP address and port, selecting the desired security policy for the endpoint, and providing the username and password.

[05:02] You’ll need to trust both the server’s certificate and the client’s certificate on the OPC UA server to establish a secure connection. Once that’s done, I can start browsing the server and subscribe to the tags I want to access.

[06:04]  And that’s it for this video! Thanks for watching, and see you in the next one!