Experience with Siemens S7-mEC

Anyone using this CPU? Looking for some background on reliability/stability of the platform as well as gotcha's..

Thanks!
Robbert

I have no experience with S7-mEC, but find it very interesting.

One "gotcha" that I know of is that it cannot be a Profibus Master. There are no DP ports onboard, and you also cannot attach any Profibus CP.
It is firmly aimed at being a Profinet IO Controller.

Are you sure Jesper? Just found a post on the Siemens forum of someone attaching a CP 5603 to the mEC. Looks like that's a PC-104 card that can do Profibus DP Master.

No not sure.
The question is if the CP5603 becomes a part or the "PC Station", or is integrated into the WinAC RTX PLC.
I'll try to investigate it a bit.

Couldnt find ANY faq or manual to describe the use of a CP5603 in connection with an S7-mEC.

However, I quckly made a test project, and managed to setup the CP5603 as a DP master module for the "WinLC RTX EC" controller. And I also managed to attach some DP slaves to the DP network on the CP5603.
So yes, the S7-mEC can be DP master by using the CP5603.

Jesper,

Thanks for checking that. Our system does have some DP slave nodes, so it's good to know we could still use the mEC for that!

Robbert

My company wants to use this PLC for a new project, but till now we have some doubts about this PLC.
After the first crash the complete OS software had to be reinstalled on the mEC to get it going again. Now the PLC crashes about once a week and you have to give a hard reboot. After that you have to clear the PLC memory with the MRES switch and than you can install the PLC software.
Siemens said to us that the memory of the mEC is causing the problem; today we received a new mEC. From a guy, we hire to do some work for us; we heard that his company has also problems with a mEC they installed by a customer of theirs. They received several new mEC’s from Siemens. Siemens said to them that the problem is probably caused by the Ethernet connection.

I think there are some recommendations regarding the Enhanced Write Filter (EWF). Are you follwing these ? Should make the S7-mEC less sensitive to "crashing" the OS.

We actually ended up going with the Microbox with WinAC per Siemens' recommendation (and it was cheaper too). So far, so good here. So your trouble may have more to do with the mEC itself.