DNP3 protocol overview in SCADA systems - Mini Project: Build & Apply

DNP3 Protocol Overview

📖 Scenario: You are working with a SCADA system that uses the DNP3 protocol to communicate between control centers and remote devices. Understanding how DNP3 structures its data and messages is important for monitoring and troubleshooting.

🎯 Goal: Build a simple representation of DNP3 data points and simulate reading their values using basic data structures and loops.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a dictionary called dnp3_points with three data points and their values

Add a variable called threshold to filter points with values above it

Use a for loop with variables point and value to iterate over dnp3_points.items() and select points above the threshold

Print the filtered points in the format Point: value

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

DNP3 is widely used in SCADA systems for electric utilities and industrial control. Understanding how to handle its data points helps in monitoring and controlling remote devices.

💼 Career

Knowledge of DNP3 data structures and filtering is useful for roles in SCADA system maintenance, network monitoring, and industrial automation.

1

Create DNP3 data points dictionary

Create a dictionary called dnp3_points with these exact entries: 'AnalogInput1': 120, 'BinaryInput1': 1, 'Counter1': 15

SCADA systems

# Create the dnp3_points dictionary with given entries
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use curly braces {} to create a dictionary with keys and values separated by colons.

2

Add threshold variable

Add a variable called threshold and set it to 10

SCADA systems

dnp3_points = {'AnalogInput1': 120, 'BinaryInput1': 1, 'Counter1': 15}
# Add threshold variable below
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Just assign the number 10 to a variable named threshold.

3

Filter points above threshold

Use a for loop with variables point and value to iterate over dnp3_points.items(). Inside the loop, select points where value is greater than threshold and add them to a new dictionary called filtered_points

SCADA systems

dnp3_points = {'AnalogInput1': 120, 'BinaryInput1': 1, 'Counter1': 15}
threshold = 10
filtered_points = {}
# Add for loop to filter points above threshold
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use for point, value in dnp3_points.items(): and an if statement to check the value.

4

Print filtered points

Use a for loop with variables point and value to iterate over filtered_points.items(). Inside the loop, print each point and value in the format Point: value

SCADA systems

dnp3_points = {'AnalogInput1': 120, 'BinaryInput1': 1, 'Counter1': 15}
threshold = 10
filtered_points = {}
for point, value in dnp3_points.items():
    if value > threshold:
        filtered_points[point] = value
# Print filtered points below
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use print(f"{point}: {value}") inside the loop to show each filtered point.