Need suggestions for cheap or free SCADA for S7-1200

aqueousdan

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Join Date
Jan 2016
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uk
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Hi there guys,

I have been playing with demo of Ignition SCADA and have it reading and writing happily with my S7-1200. The trouble is my boss thinks the £11200 price tag is a bit steep for us.

Does anyone have any experience with SCADA software that is a bit cheaper that can connect nicely to my S7-1200.

Really we are only wanting to read the contents of some counters and outputs and maybe set up some alarms.
 
aqueousdan said:
Hi there guys,

I have been playing with demo of Ignition SCADA and have it reading and writing happily with my S7-1200. The trouble is my boss thinks the £11200 price tag is a bit steep for us.

Does anyone have any experience with SCADA software that is a bit cheaper that can connect nicely to my S7-1200.

Really we are only wanting to read the contents of some counters and outputs and maybe set up some alarms.
Click to expand...

Never used it but the common one round these parts appears to be PeakHMI, there is another that pops up quite often which name escapes me at the moment.....
 
We want to be able to read data from multiple PLCs over a couple of sites. SCADA seemed to be the way to go.
 
Does AdvancedHmi support S7-1200 directly ?

£11200 for a SCADA. That does sound as you have a full-blown SCADA in mind.
If you want a smaller PC-based HMI then WinCC RT Advanced can do it, with an 128 Tag license costing around 500 €. For the ability to log to disk you need an additional license for approx 300 €

Edit: I once asked Inductive Automation if they would consider a less expensive variant for the "lesser needs", since I found the concept of Ignition enticing, but the cost way too high.
They answered that they are not interested in my market segment so it wouldnt be considered.
Seems they are competing with higher-end SCADAs such as PCS7 rather than lower-end such as small plants and machines.
 
Last edited:
aqueousdan said:
Hi there guys,

I have been playing with demo of Ignition SCADA and have it reading and writing happily with my S7-1200. The trouble is my boss thinks the £11200 price tag is a bit steep for us.

Does anyone have any experience with SCADA software that is a bit cheaper that can connect nicely to my S7-1200.

Really we are only wanting to read the contents of some counters and outputs and maybe set up some alarms.
Click to expand...

If you only need to look at a few counters and set a few alarms, then SCADA might be some serious overkill. Others have mentioned free HMI systems, which could be a good fit. However, even if the HMI software is free, you still need to buy the panel PC.

To save money there, you could use either a simple standalone HMI (like a Basic panel from Siemens, or many other brands). You mention that you have more than one PLC, the basic panels support up to 4 PLC connections, and more expensive panels would support more.

You could even use the built in webserver on the 1200. The webserver gives you the ability to you the ability to write your own HTML pages that have access to the data in the PLC and are freely accessible from any browser. It does support multiple user connections simultaneously, but you probably shouldn't try to scale that too high.
 
JesperMP said:
If you want a smaller PC-based HMI then WinCC RT Advanced can do it, with an 128 Tag license costing around 500 €. For the ability to log to disk you need an additional license for approx 300 €
Click to expand...

I'll second this! WinCC RT Advanced (WinCC Flexible Advanced actually) is what we use at the moment at one site with s7-1200. We only have two PLCs connected but it's very good and since you have s7-1200 it would be rather straight forward since it's the same developing tool (not the Flexible we use :/ )

Also keep in mind that you need the WinCC Advanced to program that will cost you like (out of my mind) around 2000 €
 

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