defcon.klaxon
Lifetime Supporting Member
Hey guys,
I'm working on a project where the client has an existing water/wastewater system that is running in NI Lookout 6.0 with unlicensed, spread spectrum serial radios for comms. It's a very simple system, basically some wells for water and a few lift stations for wastewater. The idea was that we'd replicate their existing HMI in InTouch, and use a SCADAPack PLC to control everything and get rid of Lookout. Basically, I have a new control panel and a PC workstation, and we simply unplug the radios from the existing PC running Lookout, and plug it into our new SCADAPack and do testing.
For the past few days I've been working on getting comms to work with the existing system; the radios are Digi XTends and there's a single radio at the district office that polls all the other sites; no store and forward or anything fancy, the existing Lookout program polls each site separately.
What's weird is that with the existing Lookout system, each site communicates very well; there's a comms status page that shows what's going on, and within five seconds of plugging the radio into the existing system they're all polling rock solid. But when I plug the existing radio into the SCADAPack, a few sites respond pretty well but the rest are absolutely god awful.
In order to make things as easy to test as possible, I've written a very simple program that can poll the sites manually via a push button in the HMI (here's a link to it). The program is extraordinarily simple, it's just a single MSTR block that is manually energized via a pushbutton in the HMI with a counter for successes and failures. All I'm doing to change from site to site is change the Modbus address (the various remote sites are addressed 1-10, the SCADAPack is address 11). So what's mind-numbingly frustrating is that a few sites will successfully poll all day long, but others just fail over and over. And like I said, when I plug the radio back into the existing system, within five seconds all sites are reporting good comms.
At this point I don't know what else to try, I've triple checked all the SCADAPack settings and compared it to the existing Lookout settings and nothing looks wrong. And if something was wrong in the SCADAPack settings, why would a few sites report back just fine and others not? I've checked the radio wiring and the only conductors there are Rx, Tx, and Gnd. No CTS, RTS, nothing.
Not sure how to try to figure this one out, but I figured someone here might have a suggestion for what to try.
I'm working on a project where the client has an existing water/wastewater system that is running in NI Lookout 6.0 with unlicensed, spread spectrum serial radios for comms. It's a very simple system, basically some wells for water and a few lift stations for wastewater. The idea was that we'd replicate their existing HMI in InTouch, and use a SCADAPack PLC to control everything and get rid of Lookout. Basically, I have a new control panel and a PC workstation, and we simply unplug the radios from the existing PC running Lookout, and plug it into our new SCADAPack and do testing.
For the past few days I've been working on getting comms to work with the existing system; the radios are Digi XTends and there's a single radio at the district office that polls all the other sites; no store and forward or anything fancy, the existing Lookout program polls each site separately.
What's weird is that with the existing Lookout system, each site communicates very well; there's a comms status page that shows what's going on, and within five seconds of plugging the radio into the existing system they're all polling rock solid. But when I plug the existing radio into the SCADAPack, a few sites respond pretty well but the rest are absolutely god awful.
In order to make things as easy to test as possible, I've written a very simple program that can poll the sites manually via a push button in the HMI (here's a link to it). The program is extraordinarily simple, it's just a single MSTR block that is manually energized via a pushbutton in the HMI with a counter for successes and failures. All I'm doing to change from site to site is change the Modbus address (the various remote sites are addressed 1-10, the SCADAPack is address 11). So what's mind-numbingly frustrating is that a few sites will successfully poll all day long, but others just fail over and over. And like I said, when I plug the radio back into the existing system, within five seconds all sites are reporting good comms.
At this point I don't know what else to try, I've triple checked all the SCADAPack settings and compared it to the existing Lookout settings and nothing looks wrong. And if something was wrong in the SCADAPack settings, why would a few sites report back just fine and others not? I've checked the radio wiring and the only conductors there are Rx, Tx, and Gnd. No CTS, RTS, nothing.
Not sure how to try to figure this one out, but I figured someone here might have a suggestion for what to try.