If you are interested in a broad range of functionality, such as, many lines with many workstations, the ability to generate aggregate reports across product stock keeping units, lines, and workstations, then, Essential Insight Server is the right choice.

Essential Insight Lite is available for small installations where your interest is primarily on error proofing, data collection, and providing feedback to an operator at a limited number of workstations. It is an very cost effective choice as an alternative to a PLC/HMI at a workstation as only a single PC is required.

Essential Insight versions reflect the resources available on the computer on which it will be hosted

The Essential Insight Edge View application is an operator display which provides a rich set of graphical user interface (GUI) objects to convey process information to and receive feedback from humans, for example, work instructions, current work piece process status, and/or error proofing status. The Edge View GUI object set used to create screens which consists of buttons, editable fields, lists, meters, graphs, images, and more. The Edge View runs on any computer utilizing the Microsoft Windows operating system. Because the application was constructed with touch screens in mind, all of the objects can be used to return information to the system. In cases where numerical data or alphanumeric data must be entered, the editable fields when touched invoke a number keypad or QWERTY keyboard on the screen to allow the operator to enter data without a physical keyboard. Most importantly, all of the attributes of the objects on the display can be manipulated from the workstation scripting language. As mentioned previously, Essential Insight Studio contains a WSIWIG (what you see is what you get) layout editor to assign the tag names and locate the GUI objects on the screen.

The Essential Insight® Edge I/O provides an inexpensive I/O solution to interface the Essential Insight system to other devices and equipment using discrete signals or serial interfaces. The Essential Insight Edge I/O appliance is a hardware device which provides eight (8), 2A, Form C dry contact outputs, sixteen (16) 5 – 24 VDC inputs, and two serial ports, all accessed and controlled by TCP/IP connection via the network. The Edge I/O communicates the changes of the input and ouput states to Essential Insight workstation logic, and the workstation logic writes to the device to set the output states. The data from the two serial ports are converted from serial to TCP/IP and communicated via individual TCP/IP ports.