OPC UA Online Workshop for R&D Personnel
Centria University of Applied Sciences
About Centria University of Applied Sciences
Centria University of Applied Sciences’s research and development department employs around 110 staff members. There are about 80 R&D projects ongoing each year. The aim is to develop the expertise of the companies and organizations in order to enhance their activities and competitiveness. The goal is to both provide and create new knowledge, skills, and technologies for local businesses and industries.
Centria’s R&D is closely linked to teaching activities, which allows university students to benefit from a learning environment based on real working life. Currently, Centria executes several projects with industrial and high-tech companies, where Industry 4.0 smart systems are developed, and OPC UA communications can be used.
OPC UA Workshops
Over the years, Prosys OPC has organized over 70 OPC and OPC UA workshops and trained over 600 experts. Thus, the training material and exercises are based on prominent practical experience as well as knowledge of the relevant standard specifications. In addition to public workshops, Prosys OPC also provides customized training for clients when there are a large number of participants from the same company, special needs in terms of topics and time, or training is needed at a particular site.
Usage of OPC UA is increasing due to its wide acceptance as an enabler of Industry 4.0 and other smart systems. However, it might take quite a while to understand all the details of OPC UA specifications, technology, and best practices. Or even to grasp the basics of everything that OPC UA includes: address spaces, namespaces, subscriptions, events, alarms, history data, method calls, and all that information modeling capability, not to mention the security.
Public workshops are hosted annually in several countries and today as an independent online event. When going online, Prosys OPC uses virtual classroom technology that allows participants to access the workshop anywhere in the world. Furthermore, they can also skip the time-consuming traveling and related costs.
Using an online platform, the Prosys OPC instructor presents the training materials and performs demonstrations on a shared screen. The participant works on his own exercises and can ask for help from the instructor, who monitors the progress online. Voice and desktop control system permits the communication and fixing of problems. As a result, workshop attendees learn by following the demonstrations, interacting with others as well as doing the exercises – like in a live classroom.
Prosys OPC, obviously masters OPC UA, can provide you with great tools and assist with all the details that you might ask about. However, the main question for us before we attended their OPC UA Online Workshop was whether the online course could function as well as the normal course. To our surprise, the online platform that they are using is working very well in practice.
When attending online training, you can follow the presentations even better with your screen and headphones. They also have a virtual machine prepared for everyone for the exercises, which saves you from setting it all up yourself. We found the online platform fast and flexible, and you can also get individual assistance.
Overall, we can fully recommend this training. The introduction is loaded with information about OPC UA technology, and the practical part provides hands-on exercises that will help you get your first client and server applications up and running. From an organizational perspective, the workshop in an online format was very easy and flexible to attend and offered savings in travel expenses.
Janne Känsäkoski
Development Manager, R&D, Digitalization, Centria