InTouch stops fetching data from S7 PLCs

Hi,

our company has just switched from older Modicon PLCs to S7 (5x317/2x317F) connected over ProfiNET. We use InTouch 9 for the visualisation, which is quite old but our customer did not want to upgrade that part.

We have twelve workstations running InTouch, ten of which running fine. Two however freeze repeatedly after running for a few hours or days. Freeze means that InTouch does not get new data; the computer itself is running fine.

I reinstalled InTouch/SIDirect/Sentinel from scratch already but it's still the same.

My next steps will be to let IT set up one of the boxes from scratch or replace the box completely to see if it might be an OS or a hardware problem. However, this will take a week or so.

So in the meantime, has anyone seen that by chance and knows where to start troubleshooting?

Thanks for reading and regards.

The number of PLCs and HMIs may make it plausible that the problem is that either the PLCs or the HMIs run out of available connections.

Use STEP7 to investigate the number of used/reserved/free connections on each S7 PLC.
The problem may be that connections that are not used are not released.

edit: State some details about how Intouch connects to the S7 PLCs. What drivers are used ? Is OPC used ?

Hi, thanks for your answer!

Our Siemens guy said, it was impossible to see active connections in the PLC and I am not a Windows guy, so I did not know how to look connections up on the PC side.

What I now did is configuring half of the HMI PCs to fetch the data from one PC and the other half to fetch from the PLCs as before. There have been no problems since, so I guess you were right.

Thanks for pushing me into the right direction.

Regards

PS: I am only here for a few weeks now and most ofthe stuff is still new for me. I thought SIDirect was used for connecting, so my description would be stating that already. Sorry if I am wrong.

schwarzerf said:

Our Siemens guy said, it was impossible to see active connections in the PLC

Click to expand...

This wrong.
With STEP7, display the online CPU properties (select the CPU in S7 Manager and hit CTRL-D). Then go to the communications tab. The number of configured and used conenctions will be displayed.

JesperMP said:

This wrong.
With STEP7, display the online CPU properties (select the CPU in S7 Manager and hit CTRL-D). Then go to the communications tab. The number of configured and used conenctions will be displayed.

Click to expand...

Hi,

ok, I will remember that for the next time. For now, our customer is refusing us access to the whole system due to a programming error my boss made last week (management decision; no progress means no errors, I guess ... until they realise that no progress also means no progress. ).

Since we switched the CAT-5(!) connections with CAT-7 which seems to have helped a lot (only one freeze in a week compared to two a day before).

Thanks for your help.

Regards