Learning Siemens plc language

Hi everyone,

I am mainly an AB programmer, some work with Omron and Mitshbishi.
Most jobs i am looking at require Siemens experience. How different is that from the AB type of programming and is there a lite version that i can download and work with to learn the software?
thanks in advance,
James

James,
I find AB guys often struggle with Siemens at first, but eventually grasp it. When you say Siemens, I assume you are looking at TIA portal, not Classic Step-7.
Siemens has trial versions that will run for 21 days.

Here is a link to the latest (V16) version of TIA, older versions are also available. You will have to create an account to download, but no charge.

https://support.industry.siemens.co...y-and-wincc-v16-trial-download?dti=0&lc=en-WW

Step 7 is the brand name for PLC programming software. WinCC is the brand for HMI software. There are many packages that have those keywords as part of the name, you'll probably need to be more specific than you expect with people, at least at first, until you understand what contexts make sense for each.



You can download a 21 day trial from the support site. You will need to register and wait for approval to download, but I've never heard of them denying anyone. TIA Portal V16 is the latest version. You can generally have multiple versions of Portal installed (unless you're doing SCADA class HMIs) and they'll all share the same licenses. You can migrate projects forward (V14->V16) but not backwards. THERE IS NO SAVE AS PREVIOUS VERSION. You'll use this for S71500 & S71200 PLCs as well as Basic and Comfort HMIs. It ALSO supports older PLCs, but almost no one actually does that.



https://support.industry.siemens.com/cs/us/en/view/109772803


1500 is more or less equivalent to controllogix. 1200 fits somewhere between micro800 and compactlogix. The nice thing is that they program very similarly. 1200 code can always go to a 1500, and code from a 1500 works in a 1200 99% of the time.



Depending on your customer, they may be using Simatic Manager as well, for the older PLCs (S7-300 & 400). That software typically has a 14 day trial license.


The difference between the older 300s and the newer 1500s is probably something like the difference between 500 vs 5000 on the AB side. Although you could use tagnames in S7-300s, it wasn't the default setting, and in the end it was absolute address based. The new 1500 tries to keep most things symbolic, although some of the absolute addressing roots still show through.


See this manual for a list of S7-1500 programming best practices

https://support.industry.siemens.com/cs/us/en/view/90885040


Siemens does offer an AB -> S7 fast track training class, if you want guided learning. I think they even offer an online version where you work in a remote VM but still have an instructor.


How different is it? My understanding is that Siemens is way closer to the IEC standard than AB is, but for the most part LAD is LAD. You'll be encouraged to split your code up into reusable chunks. In AB-land AOIs exist but they scare people off. In Siemensland, FBs are good tools that are strongly encouraged.


The LAD programming environment is a bit more visual/drag&drop than AB guys might be used to. There are hot keys for lots of things, but is is very different than "XIC tagname".


Siemens developed a learning curriculum to provide to schools ( to teach students the basics of PLCs), which is freely available on its website. It's intended for a standard training demo that you won't have, but you can probably adapt it to work without that.



https://new.siemens.com/global/en/c...documents/concept-and-module-description.html


Both PLCs and HMIs can be easily simulated on your PC, so you can probably get by without real HW, at least for getting started purposes.

Also, there are tons of youtube videos showing how to get started in TIA, both official ones from Siemens and videos from randos on the internet.

thanks everyone.

just got an offer as a contractor for 6 months before they decide if they want to keep me on full time to work on a data center. lots of paperwork to read. Any advice on contract work?
james

James
I suppose you will get a 1099 for the 6 months being a contractor.
I wonder if doing an LLC would pay off here?

What do the self employed/owners folks think?

A lot of the "contractor" jobs are via a job shop. Sort of like a temp agency, except for a longer duration. Some of the job shops have benefits after 90 days, some none. All depends on the contract.

If it is through a job shop, you will get a W-2.

Be prepared to get (annoyed? confused? baffled?) trying to find the right menu in TIA. It is a powerful, and therefore very complex, piece of software, and I often find it ridiculously difficult to find whatever dialog box to do what I want to do. I suspect the youtube videos might help here. Very non-intuitive, at least for me. I expect anyone who learned on TIA will have a different opinion, of course, but the number of little checkboxes and selection lists you have to chase down to do the simplest things is outlandish.



Also, the rough equivalent of RSLinx/Who is, to put it politely, unreliable. Don't even think about making the initial connection to S7 hardware from a VM guest bridged to the VM host wifi; it needs to be hardwired to the VM (e.g. USB/RJ45 with the USB owned by the VM guest). I wasted a day on that, watching valid ethernet packets be ignored by the hardware; once the S7 had an IP then the wifi bridge would work.


Finally, the default display arrangement lets you see about a rung and a half of the program at any time; I suspect there is a way to change that which would be a good idea because it is barely usable with the default layout.

TIA user interface is my biggest gripe. It is one of the reasons I still prefer Step-7 classic

drbitboy said:

Be prepared to get (annoyed? confused? baffled?) trying to find the right menu in TIA. It is a powerful, and therefore very complex, piece of software, and I often find it ridiculously difficult to find whatever dialog box to do what I want to do. I suspect the youtube videos might help here. Very non-intuitive, at least for me. I expect anyone who learned on TIA will have a different opinion, of course, but the number of little checkboxes and selection lists you have to chase down to do the simplest things is outlandish.

Click to expand...

It starts making sense eventually. Coming from Simatic Manager, it was a breath of fresh air. It made the simple things easier. But yeah, there's a million little things everywhere.

drbitboy said:

Also, the rough equivalent of RSLinx/Who is, to put it politely, unreliable. Don't even think about making the initial connection to S7 hardware from a VM guest bridged to the VM host wifi; it needs to be hardwired to the VM (e.g. USB/RJ45 with the USB owned by the VM guest). I wasted a day on that, watching valid ethernet packets be ignored by the hardware; once the S7 had an IP then the wifi bridge would work.

Click to expand...

I would agree, although the issue is usually the networking inside VMware or the wifi. VMware tries to bridge to the wrong interface way too often, and the device scan doesn't work at all in NAT mode.

drbitboy said:

Finally, the default display arrangement lets you see about a rung and a half of the program at any time; I suspect there is a way to change that which would be a good idea because it is barely usable with the default layout.

Click to expand...

It really does expect a large screen to use. On my 30" monitor in the office I never have any trouble, but that's not what you get to use when you do "real" work. There are buttons you can use to expand/shrink/autohide all the different screen areas, but you'll have to get used to fiddling with them as you do different tasks.



Most of the onsite guys I know end up getting a portable USB monitor so you can float windows over to it to expand things.

Here's a link for 1 of 8 tutorials. I give it a "A" for quality.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_lMhSkoaec&list=PLRNRsZ2S-cEMCilS1-In2HViTgWECQy2D&index=1

Check out the Siemens Cooperates with Education link as well.
https://new.siemens.com/global/en/company/sustainability/education/sce/learning-training-documents.html

Noone mentioned this yet, so I will.

TIA needs a reasonably beefy PC. If you install TIA in a VM you definitely need an SSD and a fair bit of RAM assigned to the VM (some insist that 8-12 GB is enough, I say go for 16 GB).

James Mcquade said:

Most jobs i am looking at require Siemens experience.

Click to expand...

You may want to investigate a bit further if they mean S7-Classic or TIA, or both.
Would be a shame if you spent a lot of time training for the wrong target

JesperMP said:

Noone mentioned this yet, so I will.

TIA needs a reasonably beefy PC. If you install TIA in a VM you definitely need an SSD and a fair bit of RAM assigned to the VM (some insist that 8-12 GB is enough, I say go for 16 GB).

Click to expand...

JesperMP said:

You may want to investigate a bit further if they mean S7-Classic or TIA, or both.
Would be a shame if you spent a lot of time training for the wrong target

Click to expand...

Definitely agree with both of these points.

This can be handy (Simatic S7 to Logix5000 Application Conversion Guide):
https://literature.rockwellautomation.com/idc/groups/literature/documents/ap/logix-ap008_-en-p.pdf