We had a couple companies come in and give us quotes on running the cable and connecting the set and after seeing the quotes we decided to do it in house instead.  I found the RapidRun series of cables from CablesToGo and ordered a 75′ HDMI cable with the appropriate ends.  I also ordered a second video card for one of my SCADA servers and a HDMI amplifier to compensate for the length of the run.  We ran the HDMI, and 2 runs of CATV from the control room table through the floor, across the ceiling of the room below back up through the floor in the corner of the control room, across the ceiling and down through a surface mount conduit to the display.  One of the CATV lines was for the surveillance system, the second in case sometime in the future we’d have Cable TV run into the plant for news and weather.

Installing the second video card into the SCADA server wasn’t difficult since I purchased the same brand and similar model that was already installed, so only one set of drivers needed to be installed.  I found I didn’t really need the HDMI amplifier as the card was strong enough to drive the display.

It took me about 3 days of solid design to make the schematic of the plant and add all the control tags to the Graphics Panel.  All the design for the screen had to be done at the SCADA server running the display as I h ave it running in 1900×1200 and I have no other screen that can run that resolution.  The surveillance cameras are displayed as a PiP in the corner of the graphics panel, and I embedded a black box in the SCADA screen as a place holder for where the surveillance cameras will appear.  This ended up to be very time consuming because the PiP display doesn’t always appear in exactly the same place.

This has been a great help for our operators, as now they can just pop their head in the control room and quickly see what’s happening at any location in the plant.  All indicators are tri-state, so they will show Running, Stopped and Faulted states on each device.  Our surveillance system as presets for each of the PTZ cameras, so I created a popup window on the display to show them where the presets send them to on each camera.