bmw_apprentice
Member
I have a customer who wanted to experiment with TIA portal with 1500 PLCs and comfort panels with WinCC.
This gave me my first ever chance to commission a system using both in TIA. I enjoyed it, it was a challenge getting what they wanted to do into a PLC. It really is a system more designed for a PC based solution, but needs must. It is basically a BMS system with manual intervention from the user and lots of custom messaging to a host in XML which manages work orders for the staff.
However, despite me telling them this at the start, the PLC and HMI combo has proved too expensive to roll out throughout their business and they are now looking for cost savings. They have a 1500 PLC on the shelf for their second site and I had the foresight for this to happen so did 0 scripting in the HMI and all the "hard" work in the PLC. This means moving HMI should be fairly painless as it is just a data display and user interface, if double expensive as I have to redraw everything for them, but time is cheap (ish).
Problem is finding a decent HMI which is around the 12" mark up to 15" ideally which isn't too expensive and is also not a complete nightmare to use. Looking for less than £1000 ideally, connected on TCP/IP (or profinet if that is an only option) with enough tags to draw maybe 10 screens with 80 or 90 variables per screen. They get about 30% discount on siemens kit so a 12" basic is almost within price range if you squint a bit.
Anyone had much experience with "budget" HMIs and any recommendations? Or should I convince them to go for the basic simatic panels or even the smaller comfort panels?
This gave me my first ever chance to commission a system using both in TIA. I enjoyed it, it was a challenge getting what they wanted to do into a PLC. It really is a system more designed for a PC based solution, but needs must. It is basically a BMS system with manual intervention from the user and lots of custom messaging to a host in XML which manages work orders for the staff.
However, despite me telling them this at the start, the PLC and HMI combo has proved too expensive to roll out throughout their business and they are now looking for cost savings. They have a 1500 PLC on the shelf for their second site and I had the foresight for this to happen so did 0 scripting in the HMI and all the "hard" work in the PLC. This means moving HMI should be fairly painless as it is just a data display and user interface, if double expensive as I have to redraw everything for them, but time is cheap (ish).
Problem is finding a decent HMI which is around the 12" mark up to 15" ideally which isn't too expensive and is also not a complete nightmare to use. Looking for less than £1000 ideally, connected on TCP/IP (or profinet if that is an only option) with enough tags to draw maybe 10 screens with 80 or 90 variables per screen. They get about 30% discount on siemens kit so a 12" basic is almost within price range if you squint a bit.
Anyone had much experience with "budget" HMIs and any recommendations? Or should I convince them to go for the basic simatic panels or even the smaller comfort panels?
