Panel View Plus comms with Modbus/Modsim32

I have a project being shipped to China. Part of the project calls for Panel View Plus 600's to be used and communications setup via modbus.

I am totally inexperienced with modbus. I have a trial version of ModSim32.

The only time I've ever used the Panel Veiw Plus' has been with Rockwell PLC's of some sort. The PLC in this project is unknown, the tag data base has been setup using Modbus addresses. 41100 - 41199. We are using 16 bits per word when needed to transfer bit information to the PV+.

Anyone out there ever do this before? How do you setup to test the system? Do I need to load up Kepware to run the system? Do I need to configure the PV+ for serial/ kepware or someting other?

I'm totally lost here, I need all the help I can get!!

semilogical, you may find an useful manual at the following link:

Modbus application for PVPLUS

I think there are all the informations you need.

Another nice guide is available inside Rockwell KB:

Modbus example

Important thing to remember is that you need to re-download the firmware to your PVP, including the Kepware driver you want to use.

Hope this helps....

- [font=comic sans ms,sans-serif]fuzzy logic[/font]

I do this kind of test all the time with ModSim32 and PV+. If I need to run the PC side KepServer Enterprise, I just add a USB/RS232 converter and use that for ModSim32.

If you're going to learn and test Modbus, get the license for ModSim32. It's more than paid for itself over the years for me in not having to mess with the timeout of the trial version.

The major thing, as Fuzzy has pointed out, is that you need to do a firmware upgrade of the PV+ terminal with the KepServer Modbus RTU driver included.

The biggest gotcha that I've run into doing tests is that the default for KepServer is to deactivate tags if it gets a "tag does not exist" response from the Slave device. This happens all the time when you're switching ModSim32 Trial Version back and forth or configuring its database representation, so just switch off that default setting in Kepware.