Siemens S7 Winac using com Port

I have a scanner that i need to gather the barcode for my plc of a certain material. I have a S7 Winac rtx soft-plc on the machine. Usually for that i buy a SSI card and a Et200s to get the com port. And place a small cabinet to hold that electronics, but it is an expensive solution for a 100$ cordless scanner.

The scanner has a 20meter range from the docking station. So i could, easily connect the docking station to the IPC running winac rtx and use the comm port of the scanner. I can see the codes by using the hyperterminal. But the blocks don't seem to work even if i configure COM port 1.

Does anybody know how i can do this?

Normally, it isn't possible to use the serial ports of an IPC with WinAC. There is no RTX driver for them. Siemens has developed a extra driver to allow this, but there is an additional charge for it.

http://support.automation.siemens.com/WW/view/en/48174374

Yeap. I was looking for that. Thank you. Maybe it costs less then et200 + serial card.

I will check...

Siemens send a proposal for the dll and also the ODK solution. I don't see why i need to pay the same with no hardware. It is almost the same price as the et200s with the SSI card..

this clearly isn't a solution... And the programming would increase a little.

There isn't any piece of software to send the Com Port directly to the S7?Posting the buffer on a string.

I found something on kepware and matrikopc...

The tricky bit is that WinAC runs on a realtime kernel separate from windows (for more reliable performance), so it isn't as easy to interface to as the average program. Siemens offers the ODK as a way to write a program that interfaces with WinAC, and they use that to create addons like the Serial Driver.

There isn't any piece of software to send the Com Port directly to the S7?Posting the buffer on a string.

Click to expand...

You could use the ODK to write one yourself, but that would still require purchasing the ODK, it merely saves the cost of the Serial Driver addon. There is no way to put the serial port of the IPC in the HW config of the PLC, and treat it like a CM340, or something similar.

Great news found a great solution in another forum.
Setlevel Serial winac rtx

But it depends on Ethernet. Which is not a bad thing at all because i will test tomorrow to plug this in a IPC (with a SCADA) and send data to a S7-300.

The software comes with a sample PLC project. Where you have a DB to interface. It is a windows service with a configuration, were you select the DB you want to write on. In my case DB3. I get new data by a trigger of a boolean.



I was suprised with the price they gave me. I am quite happy with the solution and my boss will be happy. We are doing the MES on the plant and i am going to do a big saving happy days


And thank you MK42 i did my search using serial drive. And i came to this

Bool

Dear ScrapperPt

Looking at your Data Table, the first row reads DB3.DBX 0.0 , in the right side the data type is shown as DEC , isn't DB3.DBX0.0 a Bool type?

Best regards
Hagos

Yes you are right. "VAT" stupidity on my side. It is a boolean. They use this structure:


UDT3:SerialLevelToS7
NewDataRS232|BOOL|FALSE|New Data received check Data Variable
iCommCheck|INT|0|This value changes every 6s.If more than 6 secs passed an error needs to be set.
Data|STRING[40]|''|Data sent from Serial Device
EmptyString|STRING[40]|''|Internal usage

So the NewDataRS232 is our trigger to get the variable DATA. I just know that it comes from the service i have installed on the machine.
So everytime i have a NewDataRS232 i use a SFC20 BLK_MOV to copy the data. And change the NewDataRS232 to false. (otherwise i don't get a new data)

Quite simple and easy.

Already have a second machine installed with the SerialLevelToS7, it is a Wincc IPC with a scanner fetching the operator ID sending directly to the PLC. That i send to a screen / Panels / printer and a marking station.

Hello,

Have you tried a connetion with S7-300 and 400 PLC or only with Rtx?

Yep. I have 2 installations.

One for a Winac RTX and 1 for a S7-300. I am sending data trought the serial port directly to the s7-300 via the cp343. The data transfer is quite fast, and i am reading the barcode on the SCADA computer and sending directly to the PLC. With Serial Com S7. Then i use it all over the machine in the SCADA / OPC server and MES.

In the winac rtx i have one scanner working for 10 machines. It is a set of machines that have the plc.

Nice piece of software.