FANDA Networking

FANDA is a capability designed by Fairmount Automation to allow external software to read and potentially update a schemas' global variables. FANDA is an acronym for Fairmount Automation Network Data Access. Fairmount Automation supports a Software Developer's Kit (FANDA SDK) which provides C and C++ software programs access to those schema variables. For example, this would allow an HMI on a PC with an Ethernet connection to control the tuning of a PID's input parameters or to view the status of and command a programmable valve. Fairmount Automation devices act as servers to the connected HMI or other vendor hardware's C/C++ extensions using the SDK. Two types of data access are available; global variable access and multicasting.  Global variables may be read or modified directly via function calls in the SDK.  Multicasting is sets of global variables who's values are periodically sent to the network via UDP multicasts.

Since all three types of variables, float, boolean and structure, are available through the FANDA interface, it is common to bundle multiple values into a structure and just make the structure variable global and available for access.

Along with the FANDA SDK for developing third-party software, Design Pad comes with two utilities for accessing data via FANDA.  The FANDA Browser utility is a Microsoft Windows application which allows realtime inspection and logging of FANDA variables and multicasts.  The FANDA OPC Server acts as a connector or bridge which provides FANDA data acess via the industry standard OPC protocol.  Using the FANDA OPC Server, any number of third-party OPC client applications may access data via FANDA.