Blog Town

Connect with KAASM for news, updates, company culture, and technology trends.

St. Paddy’s Day Happy Half-hour (virtual)

By KAASM | 03/17/2020
Featured in

Most likely you are working from home just like the rest of us. Considering your disposition as a social animal and the potential onset of cabin fever. We wanted to do something cool for the remote working community. Join us for a St. Paddy’s Day happy half-hour (virtual). No frills, just the best half-hour of your life at the virtual pub. Public message chat will be available. And music, too!

Read More
Cybersecurity Resources

Cybersecurity: Resources for Non-Experts

By Shawn Sandoval | 03/11/2020
Featured in

Do you drink water? Do you take showers? Have you turned the lights on in your house? Chance are you’ve indirectly touched an industrial control system. Industrial control systems power our daily lives, and these systems must be protected from cyber-attacks. Over the past 10 years, I’ve been fortunate to bear witness to the increased complexity of control systems and the ever-evolving nature of Industrial Automation Control Systems (IACS). As part of the industrial automation community, I wanted to share with you a few cybersecurity resources that I’ve employed over the years as a contribution to strengthening industrial cybersecurity awareness, education, and resilience.

Read More

DevOps: Continuous Deployment Using Git, Jenkins, and WinCC OA

By Calvin Hamus | 02/24/2020
Featured in ,

In the IT world, you would NEVER, EVER, EVER make edits to a production system without going through the proper development quality assurance procedures. In the industrial world for some reason, it is acceptable to not test in isolated development environments for issues or changes in a production runtime system. There are many reasons for this…time, availability of tools, “know-how” etc. With the IT and OT worlds converging at an exponential pace, we want to help our industry adopt DevOps practices by showing the tools that are available now. DevOps tools can be leveraged in modern industrial data management software packages like WinCC Open Architecture.

Read More

DevOps: Integrating Jenkins into WinCC OA

By Calvin Hamus | 02/04/2020
Featured in ,

Over the past few weeks, we have been showing how to use the DevOps practices and tools inside of WinCC OA. Today we will take one big step further and integrate Jenkins into the development process. This tutorial expects you tot have a few things and understand a few others:

Read More

What is DevOps?

By KAASM | 01/29/2020
Featured in

As the role of DevOps becomes more and more prevalent in the world of automation and industrial SCADA/MES/IIoT software, one of the first steps that should be taken into consideration is setting up different levels of environments for your developers to utilize.

Read More

DevOps: Working with Separate Environments to Minimize Downtime

By Calvin Hamus | 01/27/2020
Featured in

As the role of DevOps becomes more and more prevalent in the world of automation and industrial SCADA/MES/IIoT software, one of the first steps that should be taken into consideration is setting up different levels of environments for your developers to utilize.

Read More

DevOps: High-Speed Programming Unit Tests

By Calvin Hamus | 01/21/2020
Featured in

WinCC Open Architecture (OA) has supported Unit Tests for quite a while now, however, when Siemens released version 3.16, one of the new features was High-Speed Programming. This new feature set included a tool for project documentation and the ability to auto-generate templates for faster creation of code. In this blog, we are going to look deeper at the new way to run and write Unit Tests inside of the graphical editor (GEDI).

Read More

Is TDD the Future of SCADA/MES Development?

By Calvin Hamus | 01/21/2020
Featured in

As SCADA, MES and HMI projects become larger, more complicated, and interact with many different systems, the time has come to start thinking about adopting TDD and Unit Tests into your development lifecycle.

Read More

News & Updates: End of Life for Windows 7

By KAASM | 01/20/2020
Featured in

The “Roaring Twenties V2.0″ has begun, and with that, we must say farewell to Windows 7. This is a scary thought, knowing how many organizations are still standardized on Windows 7. Aside from Internet Backgammon and Checkers, we can also say goodbye to security updates and Microsoft technical support.

Read More

WinCC OA: Setting up Chronograf with InfluxDB

By Calvin Hamus | 01/16/2020
Featured in

With the release of WinCC OA 3.17, one of the newest and biggest changes is the addition of the NextGen Archiver. The NextGen Archiver runs on an InfluxDB database and is a great way to store your data. InfluxDB is one of the fastest-growing time-series databases in the market, which means there are already some fantastic tools that can be used to visualize your data coming out of WinCC OA. The tool I’m going to show today is Chronograf. Chronograf is the user interface for stand-alone instances of InfluxDB, but can also be used to inside of OA.

Read More
Scroll to Top