Siemens HMI Freezing?

Hi fella's,

Got a strange one for ya, got a Siemens MP270B Hmi connected to a profibus network containing 4 simocode pro v and a siemens 315-2dp plc.

When it was first installed every now and again the HMI would freeze and the only way to fix it would be to power it down. Talked to siemens about it and decided to replace the screen....everythings been working fine for 5 months now....but all of a sudden its started to freeze again.....any ideas?

Some ideas.

If the freezing up happens at any time:
Noise.
Insufficient grounding.
Bad cabling (check all connectors)

If the freezing up happens at some kind of user interaction:
A hidden bug in the user program.
This can happen with both Protool and WinCC Flexible.

To find/clear the errors in Protool:
Open the cross reference.
Press CTRL and then RIGHTCLICK with the mouse anywhere in the crossreference window. In the menu that appears, select "Scan all logerror". If there are any errors - marked with red color - then repeat and select "Repair All".

To find/clear the errors in WinCC Flexible:
Use the Rebuild All function.

Will Check, cheers JesperMp

I might have had a similar problem with an MP370 connected to a S7-314C-2DP about nine months ago. We had no problems with the HMI for three months, and then it would freeze when we powered up the machine. By this I mean when we applied power to the machine, the MP370 would boot until it showed the Windows desktop and then stopped. The "Loader" window would not appear. We tried cycling power to the whole machine and just the MP370 until it powered up properly.

Siemens suggested two things. First, make sure the 24V power supply was sufficiently rated for the in rush of all the devices connected to it. Second, they suggested an OS update to the panel.

We ended up doing the OS update and never had a problem with it again - at least as far as I know as we shipped the machine to our customer shortly after that. One other thing I should mention is that we have not experienced this problem with any other MP370s since then and we go through at least two a month.

OK, changed the HMI to run on MPI leaving everything else on Profibus, and the frezzing stilll happens. One thing we did notice though was that the hmi would dim and then light back up after 4 minutes.

We are recording events on the hmi and this seems to be bringing out of screensaver/dim mode. We are starting to wonder if all the events are casuing a problem (they arent being to logged to a card or anything though)? Any Ideas?

We had simular problems with TP270 displays. We noticed that when we removed the flash card from the display, then the display would power up without problems. First Siemens said this was due to an old version of the bootloader. (We send a lot of display back for updating to get an operating system update)

This did not solve the problem. No they are saying it has something to do with the flash cards. (We are logging alarms (archive) on the flash card).

At the moment we just remove the flash cards from the displays. This seems to solve the problem.

Hi there Coops,

Can you tell us with which protool version you've programmed the MP? And can you give us the firmware version of the OS used?

By the way; you can update the OS yourself with prosave or with WinCC flex.

Cant remember but the problem has been fixed. It was to do with the events list. Done a update on the system with the latest siemens patches and all is working well now.