TIA Portal - the good, the bad and the ugly...

I recently completed a TIA Portal course and thought I would put some of my thoughts on here for those who have yet to experience it.

Firstly, the Good...

IEC timers and counters are readily available. Some good new ladder functions available "In Range" "Out of Range" to check if values are within certain bounds etc. Setting up networks and hardware is a lot easier and a lot more visual which I like. Symbols, network titles etc all get downloaded to the PLC now so you can upload them along with the software. Gone are the days of uploading DBs and getting the dreaded STAT for all the variable names. On the subject of DBs they can now be downloaded without having to reinitialise them. Even when they have had a structure change. Very easy to see if blocks don't match the PLC, it does an automatic comparison when you go online and makes it obvious which blocks match and which don't.

The Bad...

On a laptop screen the display is extremely cluttered. You find yourself constantly minimising, moving, hiding, showing, various small windows. There are ways of speeding this process up but nevertheless this software really needs a 24"+ screen or two monitors. The software still has quite a few 'bugs' and some odd behaviour. I was using version 13 and there were things that didn't quite work right. Or would suddenly start working when previously they hadn't. You don't feel that the software is very robust.

The Ugly...

The software seems to have some quite bad memory leaks. After a few hours of use it complains of not having enough resources, even on a laptop with 4Gb of RAM and an SSD. Only rebooting the laptop stops this (for another few hours). I would hate to think how slow this software would be on a less spec'd laptop that was also running other software.

So, in summary, still a lot of work to do on this software to get it right but they seem to be moving in the right direction. It was released to industry far too early. It almost seems that they released an Alpha version and then got industry to pay for the continued development through the sale of licenses.

I think in a year or two with all the bugs ironed out and on a decent PC with a large display (or twin display) this would be a joy to use.

Couldn't agree more on the screen size required. SP1 for V13 is supposed to have fixed a lot of problems, certainly I can run it for a day without it falling over..... most of the time. However SP1 is a huge download. I hate the licensing system, the people who do the right thing are stuck with it, those who don't do the right thing just download a cracked version anyway. So they punish the good guys.

BryanG said:

I hate the licensing system, the people who do the right thing are stuck with it, those who don't do the right thing just download a cracked version anyway. So they punish the good guys.

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Yep I completely agree. We're hanging off buying the software because we don't want to be purchasing licenses and basically funding Siemens as they develop workable software. Much cheaper to wait until the software is completely finished and robust and then fork out for a license.

I think if Siemens adopted a more flexible and fair licensing system then they would attract a lot more customers and not have their existing customers feeling cheated a lot of the time.

If Siemens were to introduce bug free software at this point, then we that have used S7 and lived with bugs for almost the last 20 years would feel cheated. What makes you think that TIA will ever be bug free? Everything has a workaround of some sort, and the guys at the pit face just have to live with the fact that nothing is perfect.
Except maybe Beyonce.

If Siemens made Beyonce you'd be paying £1,000 for the album and then a further £500 for every track that you wanted on the album!

S7 was/is very robust though. It does crash occassionally but certainly not as buggy as TIA at the moment.

Although I do see a bright future for TIA if they can iron all the issues out and technology evolves to give us much bigger screens on our laptops.

Liam Moran said:

If Siemens were to introduce bug free software at this point,

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Job security for the programmers - if they put out bug-free software they would get laid-off until the next program update was in the works.

TIA Portal is SLOW! While it is light-years ahead for ease of use vs. Step-7 it really can try a person's patience. I just finished re-booting my virtual machine because of a TIA crash. I couldn't re-open my project (Project in use error) so it's shut-down my 4G virtual machine. 10 minutes of my life lost forever. I my CodeSys, A-B, and Schneider virtual machines run great on 1G.

Just recently bought a new laptop and it runs TIA portal smooth as anything. I guess you have to have better machines nowdays for the more powerfull programs.

I don't install anything directly on my machine, I only use virtual machines under VMware. Even so if I can run my Rockwell, CodeSys, and Unity machines on 1G and they work great I should expect TIA to run well on 4G.

Using a fast SSD improves a lot the performance of TIA Portal using a VM. It also improves if you force VMware to use only RAM for the virtual machine RAM:
Editar->Preferences->Memory->Fit all virtual machine memory into reserved host RAM


Kelkoon

4GB is to little since Siemens recommends:

Processor
Core i5-3320M , 3.3 GHz
RAM
8 GB
Screen resolution
1920 x 1080 px

uptown47 said:

I think if Siemens adopted a more flexible and fair licensing system then they would attract a lot more customers and not have their existing customers feeling cheated a lot of the time.

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I'm curious, what do you feel is unfair about the licensing? The adjectives that come to my mind are complicated/complex/annoying and maybe expensive, but unfair hadn't occurred to me. What do you wish they did differently?

It starts out as an informative discussion about the good and bad of Siemens TIA software, but then someone sees an opportunity to derail into totally irrelevant rants about software licensing.

My opinion about TIA is that I am very irritated by the user interface, with its myriad of windows, and tabs and sub-tabs.
Some of the features are indeed nice, but for the bulk of my PLC work I primarily need a fast and intuitive code editor, and this is lacking. SCL/STL is alright, LAD/FBD is not.
When I work with WinCC, there are many small things that works just as bad as in WinCC Flexible, or not as good as in WinCC Flexible.

Jesper, I do not see what you do when you say the thread has been derailed
into irrelevant rants about software licencing, surely the licence system as part of TIA is as worthy of comment as any other feature?
Particularly so as the licence was mentioned by uptown47 in his original post.

Liam Moran said:

Jesper, I do not see what you do when you say the thread has been derailed
into irrelevant rants about software licencing, surely the licence system as part of TIA is as worthy of comment as any other feature?
Particularly so as the licence was mentioned by uptown47 in his original post.

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My bad. I shouldnt have been lured into this thread by the title "TIA Portal - the good, the bad and the ugly".
Yes "license" was mentioned in the 1st post in a way that I thought was just a "funny" remark.
If Siemens licensing system is fair or not is IMO irrelevant for the topic of the quality of TIA.