Scheduler for Siemens PLC's

Hi all,

I have written an application for scheduling starts an stops in dotNet. This application can be used for managing the starting and stopping of units with a calendar. There is no complex configuration with OPC or whatever, because the connection layer is written around the libnodave class.

Here are soms screenshots:

http://www.automationsoftware.be/index.html

Any ideas on making things better ?
If you guys see gaps for improvement, please let me know.
If anyone wants to see code, that's also fine by me, as I am on a forum with programmers offcourse .
Anyone want's to test, just ask.

Any comments are very welcome as I am motivated to improve the amp in later versions.

Thanks in advance,

Kind regards,
G

response

Hello,

Additional question: When you need to schedule with a PLC, how do you so it, with WinCC and Calendar or custom made calendar in the PLC... Or ??

Regards,
G

Combo said:

Hi all,

I have written an application for scheduling starts an stops in dotNet. This application can be used for managing the starting and stopping of units with a calendar. There is no complex configuration with OPC or whatever, because the connection layer is written around the libnodave class.

Here are soms screenshots:

http://www.automationsoftware.be/index.html

Any ideas on making things better ?
If you guys see gaps for improvement, please let me know.
If anyone wants to see code, that's also fine by me, as I am on a forum with programmers offcourse .
Anyone want's to test, just ask.

Any comments are very welcome as I am motivated to improve the amp in later versions.

Thanks in advance,

Kind regards,
G

Click to expand...

Hi!

Usually it is pretty hard to schedule things in a PLC. Maybe hard is the wrong word. It is just cumbersome, and yes that might be just a single opinion. This would be much easier to do with a top system like the one you made, or in WinCC (no experience here).

I have made some simple scheduling applications, but using SFC1 to read the PLC clock. This block outputs an DATE_TIME output, which is basically an array of 8 bytes with first byte as YEAR, and consequently MONTH, DAY, HOUR, MINUTE, SECOND etc.

You could use these to start/stop things.

Another good way is to use TIME OF DAY interrupts. Unsure if this is changeable without altering Hardware Setup.

Is this what you asked, or?..

plc

Hello boneless,

Yes indeed. I'm interested in how other engineers solve such software requests. In my carreer I have allready seen a lot of overkill applications just because of the support of certain functionallities. For example, in 2005, I made a scheduling thing in WinCC 6.0, todo this we had to buy the PCS7 scheduler to integrate this in WinCC. This was around 1250 euros and the triggering of the bits still needed some C code. Now with Calendar option on WinCC 7, this is a step forward but very expensive for small companies who don't need a Scada system I think. This is just an example. Sometimes there are made overkill solutions. That's why I try to build all these examples in .net programs.

Kind regards and thanks for your reply
G

boneless said:

Hi!

Usually it is pretty hard to schedule things in a PLC. Maybe hard is the wrong word. It is just cumbersome, and yes that might be just a single opinion. This would be much easier to do with a top system like the one you made, or in WinCC (no experience here).

I have made some simple scheduling applications, but using SFC1 to read the PLC clock. This block outputs an DATE_TIME output, which is basically an array of 8 bytes with first byte as YEAR, and consequently MONTH, DAY, HOUR, MINUTE, SECOND etc.

You could use these to start/stop things.

Another good way is to use TIME OF DAY interrupts. Unsure if this is changeable without altering Hardware Setup.

Is this what you asked, or?..

Click to expand...