Wachendorff M-Bus/Ethernet Adapter with CompactLogix

Dear experts,

Got the challenge of connecting a HD67030-B2 MBUS/Ethernet adapter with my CompactLogix L32E PLC to read M-Bus data in the PLC, would like to know if someone can give me a pointer to how should I be doing this, I have no idea if this supports messaging or I can add it as a Generic Ethernet module.
This is the manual of the product,
http://www.adfweb.com/download/filefold/MN67030_ENG.pdf

Tried looking for some more information on saint google, but nothing I could use.
Don't know what else to do, usually I find everything I need on this forum, but nothing cam up.

Hope you guys can help me,

Best Regards

That device is nothing more than a dumb converter from M-Bus to Ethernet on physical layer. You have to implement the complete M-Bus protocol in software with your plc.
The M-Bus specification is available at:
http://www.m-bus.com/

It's much easier with the M-Bus/Modbus TCP gateway also from Wachendorff. This does the M-Bus protocol for you. You have only to configure the M-Bus device and the mapping to modbus registers you can simple read out with your plc.

Well that gave me a stomache,

Thanks for your reply, so in the case I could order a different model, I have Devicenet and Ethernet available for adapters, what would you recommend?

Best Regards

I would recommend a gateway with a protocol which your plc supports best.
I'm not familiar with Rockwell plcs, but if it supports DeviceNet and there is a DeviceNet gateway available, I would choose such one.

I had to do M-Bus with a Siemens S7-300, so I have choosen the M-Bus/Modbus-TCP Gateway (Siemens hasn't built in support for Modbus, but it's easy to implement).

Fo any further reference in case any1 needs some more information about this particular adapter, and since I had to put up with it.
First off the basics for communicating with this is through sockets, wether UDP or TCP. Now you might want to ask yourself which one is more reliable and I would say go with TCP, although I'm not even close to grasp the concepts socket programming, so don't take my word for it.
That been said, I went looking for socket programming on CompactLogix and found out that it is in fact possible and you can do it in pretty much every Ethernet module/CPU with Ethernet port. Now there's some restrictions to it since you need to have v20 at least to do it in a Logix CPU, so be aware of it.
Since in my case I couldn't upgrade to firmware 20 and had v19 I had to consider a different approach, so decided to do it on the SCADA, which in my case is Citect.
So I went for it but sadly wether for my programming skills or because they just don't work with each other I couldn't get Citect to properly initialize the port with the ComOpen function.
After a fair amount of time struggling with Citect and testing all of the examples I could find, I gave up and ended up doing it on C which is far more familiar and versatile, took me about half a day to do the socket programming and saving everything to a text file, since this data for my case is not critical at all, the timing is not actually relevant.
I know is not elegant but I had a dead line of 4 days to come up with a solution, and this one was actually not that bad since I only have 2 meters on the M-Bus network.
Well hope this helps, as always any suggestion and comments are very much welcome.

Regards

Which gateway have you choosen?
Plain TCP, DeviceNet or anything else?

I ended up using the dumb adapter HD67030-B2 , no gateway.

Thanks for your help

slashgnr6971 said:

I ended up using the dumb adapter HD67030-B2 , no gateway.

Click to expand...

Was I right that you have to do M-Bus protocol in software with this device?
Are there programming examples available, or did you do it with the M-Bus protocol description?

Yes you were right, had to do the M-Bus protocol in C, however only had to do the REQ_UD2 and SND_UD instructions as well as the data decoding.
Used the M-Bus page for this as well as the meters data sheets.
I couldnt find any programming examples of the MBus protocol, only third party activex that you have to purchase.
One testing tool that was very handy to test is the Tcp_Test_tool you can find it on the adfweb page.
www.adfweb.com/download/filefold/tcptesttool.zip