Siemens 1200 to 1500 comms

Does anyone know of a Siemens example project for passing data between a 1200 and a 1500?

I thought I found one before but can't find it now.

I believe it used open user connection to pass the data instead of put/get. This way the datablocks can stay optimized.

I will start to write my own just was looking for a template.

JOLTRON said:

Does anyone know of a Siemens example project for passing data between a 1200 and a 1500?

I thought I found one before but can't find it now.

I believe it used open user connection to pass the data instead of put/get. This way the datablocks can stay optimized.

I will start to write my own just was looking for a template.

Click to expand...

I'm a fan of I-Device, personally.

I've had some trouble finding a couple sample projects on the Siemens support site over the past couple weeks. I'm not sure if they took some stuff down, or if I just fail at searching.

I have never used that option. I thought it was mainly for discrete IO. I am looking to pass up to 100 bytes of data. with a mixture of ints, words, dwords, strings and arrays.

Would I-Device work for this? I will do some digging.

JOLTRON said:

I have never used that option. I thought it was mainly for discrete IO. I am looking to pass up to 100 bytes of data. with a mixture of ints, words, dwords, strings and arrays.

Would I-Device work for this? I will do some digging.

Click to expand...

Different I-Devices support different amounts of data, but I think it is typical to see maximums on the order of 1000 bytes. The 1200 supports only supports 1024 bytes oh IO, and I think that is also the maximum size of a PN slot. If you do 1500 to 1500, I think you can do up to the maximum size of a PN packet (1440 bytes) each direction, by declaring multiple transfer areas.

The IO is passed using PN just like normal IO, and it is passed every cycle. If you're doing safety communication, there are a few blocks you need to use, but normal I-Device comms just maps an IO area in the I-Device to an IO area in the Controller.

You only need to activate it on the I-Device side, the COntroller just sees it as normal IO. However, it doesn't work well for many-to-many type peer communications, it is better suited for a master/slave type model. Technically you can do shared I-device, where a slave has multiple masters, but that gets complicated. If you need to "broadcast" data, I recommend having all the devices but one being I-Devices, and then having one Controller for all of them, which moves the data around.

Thanks for the info!

I found some basic information on the setup of the I-Device on the Siemens site but I didn't see if it would work on both of the nic's on the 1500. When passing safety data I was told it has to be done on the X1 interface (the one with the built in switch between the ports) since this supports full profinet. The X2 interface is the single gigabit interface, and I was informed it only supports limited profinet functions.

Do you have any experience with that?

This is the application example I found:
https://support.industry.siemens.co...-of-profinet-i-device-function?dti=0&lc=en-US

Unfortunately, the X1 port is the only real PN port on the device. X2 supports a few profinet features like device detection (DCP) and maybe topology (LLDP), but it doesn't support IO. Not only do you need to use X1 for safety comms, X1 is used for all of your PN data. X2 still supports S7 connections, HMI/OPC/PG connections, TCP, etc

The brochures and marketing material is usually pretty vague about this difference, and the tech specs are super confusing for other reasons. X2 is called a Profinet port, whereas X1 is for Profinet IO. It's splitting hairs in marketing, but a huge difference in actual functionality.

They have PN communication cards for the 1500, but I don't think those support acting as an I-Device either. However, they can at least be a controller if the other PLC acts as the I-Device.

So yeah, I guess I should have mentioned that before: to use I-Device, the PLCs all have to be on the same subnet as the IO network, because it uses the IO mechanism. I hope this is rectified eventually. It seems silly to sell a PLC with 2 ethernet interfaces, but then only support IO on one of them. At first I assumed it was a step 1 sort of situation, and it would be fixed with a firmware update. 1500 is up to v1.8, and it hasn't been added yet.