Hi All
I did a search of the forum and I didn't find anything that I appeared to be about my issue.
A little baskground first. All our machines have AB PLC´s. The newer ones are all CompactLogix however older ones use ControlLogix, SLC 500 and Micrologix. Most of them have PanelView Plus 700 HMI´s, with some of the older ones having PanelView 550´s.
What I would like to do is this, when a customer calls with a problem and needs assistance, at times it's an issue that requires me to "Go Online" with the PLC in order to resolve it (sometimes it is a bug that has since been corrected but has not been passed to them etc). However I would say 95%+ of our customers do not have RSLogix 500/5000 or any other AB software.
We have already done this with a few customers who had AB software and we used Teamviewer in order to make any changes or upgrades to the machines. However Teamviewer will only work if the customer has AB software on the machine that the PLC is connected to.
So what I would like to do would be to use some form of remote access where the customer would connect an Ethernet cable (lets assume that they have a PLC with an ethernet port) from the PLC to their computer and then using my PC "Take Control" of their PC and make any adjustments necessary in their PLC.
You´ll notice that I'm not using very specific terms here because I don't know if this kind of thing is even possible (I guess it is, using some form of VPN but I'm not sure).
Has anyone any experience implementing something along these lines? Ideally we would like this to use "Freeware" and we do not want to have to put special hardware into the machine if at all possible.
Thanks very much in advance for all help or ideas.
Regards
Ian
I did a search of the forum and I didn't find anything that I appeared to be about my issue.
A little baskground first. All our machines have AB PLC´s. The newer ones are all CompactLogix however older ones use ControlLogix, SLC 500 and Micrologix. Most of them have PanelView Plus 700 HMI´s, with some of the older ones having PanelView 550´s.
What I would like to do is this, when a customer calls with a problem and needs assistance, at times it's an issue that requires me to "Go Online" with the PLC in order to resolve it (sometimes it is a bug that has since been corrected but has not been passed to them etc). However I would say 95%+ of our customers do not have RSLogix 500/5000 or any other AB software.
We have already done this with a few customers who had AB software and we used Teamviewer in order to make any changes or upgrades to the machines. However Teamviewer will only work if the customer has AB software on the machine that the PLC is connected to.
So what I would like to do would be to use some form of remote access where the customer would connect an Ethernet cable (lets assume that they have a PLC with an ethernet port) from the PLC to their computer and then using my PC "Take Control" of their PC and make any adjustments necessary in their PLC.
You´ll notice that I'm not using very specific terms here because I don't know if this kind of thing is even possible (I guess it is, using some form of VPN but I'm not sure).
Has anyone any experience implementing something along these lines? Ideally we would like this to use "Freeware" and we do not want to have to put special hardware into the machine if at all possible.
Thanks very much in advance for all help or ideas.
Regards
Ian