Citect comms to Hirschmann Switches

Hey guys,

Has anyone had any luck / know if it's possible to use Citect to monitor status data and statistics from a hirschmann managed switch?

I got in touch with Citect support and they said to check out the SNMPII driver.

Thanks,

Josh

The Hirschmann switches I have used all supported EtherNet/IP as well, so in theory you could use an EtherNet/IP driver to read the parameters that are exposed. In practice, though, it's not so simple. EtherNet/IP has various forms of communications and can be extended so simple 'we support EtherNet/IP' really does not mean it is compatible with any other particular device.

The Hirschmann device will do Class 1, UCMM, and Class 3 comms with various objects yielding lots of different information, all in the user manual. However, looking at the Citect drivers in the past, they are specific to Rockwell and the vendor extensions they have created for getting tags out of Logix5K devices (have done this), and I suspect there is a driver for PCCC over EIP to get data out of Logix500 devices. In either of these cases, the service codes and object/instances are fixed to the Rockwell extensions so are not useful for general EIP communication using UCMM or Class 3 explicit messaging. Citect definitely does not support Class 1 or IO communications natively, though with a a Hilscher or Molex adapter in the PC it may be possible to go this route, but not sure it's worth the trouble.

So after all that, I would either:

1. Use SNMP driver in Citect
2. Use EtherNet/IP and feed the data into a controller, either Rockwell or Schneider, and then expose the data that I wanted from there, which Citect then has a fieldbus driver for either platform.