Learning Siemens plc language

I found https://bin95.com/siemens-plc-simulator.htm to be helpful with understanding how siemens programing worked. I would not call this the end all of training, but it did help with basic understanding of how things function. I don't think it cost more than $100 when I purchased it. From time to time I still fire up the simulator and make the robots go crazy.
 
You will be fine. :)



User interface will take some time getting used to, but I think things are fairly intuitive. Great examples online too.



If you are fluent in other brands, you have a good grasp on the concepts. Drives and safety can be a bit fidgety.



Support for Siemens is great as well. This site is a great resource, as is the Siemens forum. Even Siemens support has been awesome when sending questions by mail (I deal with Siemens Norway, might be different in the US)
 
Support for Siemens is great as well. This site is a great resource, as is the Siemens forum. Even Siemens support has been awesome when sending questions by mail (I deal with Siemens Norway, might be different in the US)

Support in the US is pretty good, and they don't generally charge, unless you're calling about something really old like an S5. You have the option of paying for 24 hr support or "priority" support, which means getting a faster callback. Without priority support, I think I heard they try to maintain a 2 hour callback window; I very rarely get a same day call back on a case I create after 3pm.

Sometimes you catch a guy on a bad day or in a hurry, but I generally get pretty good answers to questions.

The techs are a nice bunch of good ol boys in TN, and most of them have been doing it for a while. I'm about a 50/50 split between calling cases in and submitting them through the support site. Both are pretty friendly methods. Honestly, I really like how they handle the call center: there's no dang impersonal menu. There's a real person who picks up the phone, takes your info, gathers your info, and creates a ticket for you in the appropriate queue. I think it's the same number for a huge swath of products, and even commercial questions. I think I sat on hold for about 10 sec once, but almost always someone picks up on ring 3.
 
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Can you have TIA and RsLogix 5k running happily on the same computer ?


CAN yes. You probably don't want them open at the same time. You definitely want to stick with Ethernet comms though, not serial, and even then sometimes there are conflicts.


Most people do VMs to keep things simple, and not have to worry about it.
 
I'd say TIA has a lot to learn but it is powerful as mentioned. Using SCL sometimes can make a days worth of work in LAD take 5 minutes.
TIA is good in the sense that it will tell you where you've gone wrong, and you can click the green arrow to quickly direct you to the issue. Its harder to make mistakes in TIA as such comparing to other PLC software, S7 classic included, for example if I make an online change of a block interface in classic and download the FB without the updated DB then it will result in a stop, unlike TIA it won't let you go wrong.



Jesper is right on the PC spec front, TIA is very resource heavy on the PC, I've ran it on 8GB and at times it can get a bit frustrating the speed it goes but it will get the job done


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.



I fell into the same trap once :'(
 
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