WinCC "PLC Offline" alarm example

Hi all,
rookie question:

I have WinCC PC station and S7 PLC connected over ethernet.
My goal is to generate alarm on HMI (or lock it out) whenever PLC is offline. So far I figured out how to work with PLC internal faults, but not if the PLC is unreachable.

How do I attack this? Any "Hello World!" examples you guys might share?
(I use TIA)
Thanks!

Pavel_Le said:

Hi all,
rookie question:

I have WinCC PC station and S7 PLC connected over ethernet.
My goal is to generate alarm on HMI (or lock it out) whenever PLC is offline. So far I figured out how to work with PLC internal faults, but not if the PLC is unreachable.

How do I attack this? Any "Hello World!" examples you guys might share?
(I use TIA)
Thanks!

Click to expand...

Which CPU?

Have a look at this for flexible panel to get the general idea.


fthis

First of all, what are you using? WinCC Advanced, Flexible? S7-1200, 1500? TIA 13, 14, 15?

I've used the coordination area pointer with a WinCC Comfort panel and S7-1500 CPU in the past, and though it's finicky and not at all well documented, it works.

CommissioningMan said:

First of all, what are you using? WinCC Advanced, Flexible? S7-1200, 1500? TIA 13, 14, 15?

I've used the coordination area pointer with a WinCC Comfort panel and S7-1500 CPU in the past, and though it's finicky and not at all well documented, it works.

Click to expand...

TIA 15, WinCC Poffessional, S7-300 (I think PLC model is irrelevant in this case)

WinCC Professional has built in connection monitoring. The Connections editor should have more details, such as the timers presets used.

There are a ton of system alarms that are automatically generated. One of them is "Connection NAME disconnected" (or connected). I believe you can choose to display the System Events in your Alarm View. You can also use the Events on the system alarms, to trigger scripts or system functions based on their calling.

According to the help file, there are also some system tags you can create. Creating a tag called "@<ConnectionName>@ConnectionState" allows you to read the current status of the connection (1 = connected). If you use @ForceConnectionState instead, then you can write to the tag and allow actually activating and deactivating the connection in Runtime. Search for @ConnectionState in the help for more info.

Pavel_Le said:

TIA 15, WinCC Poffessional, S7-300 (I think PLC model is irrelevant in this case)

Click to expand...

CPU type may very well be relevant for some system functions like "GetPLCMode" and I'm sure others that I'm not familiar with.

MK42's suggestion should work with comfort panels and runtime advanced but I don't recall seeing it with runtime professional. I guess I have some testing to do when I get sometime.

kalabdel said:

MK42's suggestion should work with comfort panels and runtime advanced but I don't recall seeing it with runtime professional. I guess I have some testing to do when I get sometime.

Click to expand...

The first idea is from comfort/adv, true, but the second idea is straight from the WinCC Pro help. I don't think it works in adv.

mk42 said:

The first idea is from comfort/adv, true, but the second idea is straight from the WinCC Pro help. I don't think it works in adv.

Click to expand...

That's great. Thanks mk42