Ethernet/IP testing on PC

Hello,

Is there any software to send Ethernet/IP messages (or function as a Ethernet/IP master) on a windows PC? My company uses Horner PLC's, and we have always used Modbus TCP/IP for communication. These PLC's can function as Ethernet/IP slaves as well, but since they are all slaves, we have no master to test with...

We may be deploying soon into a mixed environment, and would love to test our Horner units with Ethernet/IP without acquiring additional equipment.

Any help would be much appreciated

Thomas

I don't know what type of communications the Horner supports, but if explicit (Class 3 or UCMM) then there are several options:

Molex has a free tool for explicit messaging.

Also it's possible an HMI package that has an emulator may be able to create requests. For example, Redlion emulator on the PC could make EtherNet/IP explicit messages to a Rockwell PLC. Not sure if that helps here, but extend the idea: Schneider's Magelis line has a generic driver to use class/instance/attribute addressing and an emulator - if you have Vijeo Designer, it might work to make requests for your Horner unit. Inductive Automation's free OPC/UA driver can make EtherNet/IP requests to a Rockwell PLC too. I am sure others can describe plenty of other free options, even if only time limited.

If you need a class 1 scanner, it's a little tougher. Pyramid Solutions has a scanner tool for a PC, but it's not free as far as I can tell.

There is an open source Class 1 adapter on SourceForge: http://sourceforge.net/projects/opener/

In the forums they discuss modifications to use as a scanner, but I have never tested this. The adapter functionality works pretty well.

Otherwise, it might be hardware... Rockwell, Schneider, Omron, Phoenix Contact (?)...

I don't know if this is anything close to what you need, but I've been playing with the open-source phpModbus package (http://code.google.com/p/phpmodbus/) to talk to my Click PLC using Modbus/TCP through a GridConnect Modbus RTU-TCP adapter.

It's definitely "roll-your-own", but if you can do some PHP coding it's very easy to use, and it's free. If you're interested, I'd be glad to share the (crude) pieces of code I've written to read and write PLC registers from HTML pages.

Thanks Robert for the suggestions, the Molex looks promising and I will give it a try.

For what its worth:
"The Ethernet Module supports Class 3 connections for explicit messaging, and Class 1 connections for I/O (Implicit) messaging."

Albert:

I build webpages to run on horner PLC's... They are also crude, but they work. I would love to see some of your HTML, I can share mine as well.

I would like to create more interactive webpages that do more than read/write registers to the PLC, but I'm not there yet.

Sorry for the slow reply.

The heart of what I'm developing is a PHP class which creates a "ClickPLC" object. The class includes methods to read and write registers, using either PLC register names (e.g. X1, Y25) or "nicknames" (in Click terminology), which are labels for particular registers, assigned by the user or pre-set by the system. For example, in a given program the user may assign register X7 the nickname "Conveyor Start".

These methods, in turn, call methods which return the Modbus address associated with a particular register name, using a table lookup to find the starting address for a block of register names, then adding an offset for the register number. The table also lists the Modbus function codes valid for a particular type of register.

Anyway, I'll dig up the current version (I haven't had a chance to work on it in a couple of weeks) and post it.