Hi, I am *not* a involved in programming PLCs in any way. I do IT support for a factory where a couple of the guys maintain the PLCs and I support them.
They mostly use siemens controllers for everything. They don't have any sort of a network connected up. Instead they take a laptop to the machines, or bring the siemens controllers to their lab and program them there. They do this using either the Siemens Simatic S7 PC-USB adaptor or equivalents like the Systeme Helmholz Netlink USB compact
We've got winxp virtualized using Virtualbox to support the older Siemens packages which have been happily working without issues until last week when the USB device mapping stopped working and I haven't been able to get it to reliably work again since.
So, I would like to cut out the usb adaptor and switch to IP. I.e:
virtual winxp <--IP-->moxa adaptor <--RS422->Siematic S7-300
but I don't know how the siemens stuff works. The Siemens profibus interface seems to be a DB9 RS422 interface. It should be possible to connect this to a Moxa converter to allow us to connect via IP. However, I don't know what options should be configured for this to work with, say, a Siemens Siematic S7-300, nor which pinouts should be used to do the interconnect. i.e DCE or DTE pinout config? Are these 2-wire or 4-wire for rx/tx?
I've spent quite some time trawling through online docs without any luck. Almost all the info online is geared to programming these - perfectly reasonable really, but not what I'm looking for.
Has anyone done this? Can you point me in the direction of a doc or page which summarizes whats what. I'm familiar with Sync and Async comms, what I don't know is what should work with the siemens tools and their PLCs.
Thanks in advance.
Ian
They mostly use siemens controllers for everything. They don't have any sort of a network connected up. Instead they take a laptop to the machines, or bring the siemens controllers to their lab and program them there. They do this using either the Siemens Simatic S7 PC-USB adaptor or equivalents like the Systeme Helmholz Netlink USB compact
We've got winxp virtualized using Virtualbox to support the older Siemens packages which have been happily working without issues until last week when the USB device mapping stopped working and I haven't been able to get it to reliably work again since.
So, I would like to cut out the usb adaptor and switch to IP. I.e:
virtual winxp <--IP-->moxa adaptor <--RS422->Siematic S7-300
but I don't know how the siemens stuff works. The Siemens profibus interface seems to be a DB9 RS422 interface. It should be possible to connect this to a Moxa converter to allow us to connect via IP. However, I don't know what options should be configured for this to work with, say, a Siemens Siematic S7-300, nor which pinouts should be used to do the interconnect. i.e DCE or DTE pinout config? Are these 2-wire or 4-wire for rx/tx?
I've spent quite some time trawling through online docs without any luck. Almost all the info online is geared to programming these - perfectly reasonable really, but not what I'm looking for.
Has anyone done this? Can you point me in the direction of a doc or page which summarizes whats what. I'm familiar with Sync and Async comms, what I don't know is what should work with the siemens tools and their PLCs.
Thanks in advance.
Ian