Modicon Quantum PLC + Citect HMI

sikeoboy

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Join Date
Jul 2008
Location
Vancouver
Posts
9
Hello All,

I am trying to work out a network architecture block diagram for using a Modicon Quantum PLC and using Citect front end for the HMI.

As I understand, this combination can be used successfully - is anyone familiar with it?

Can anyone point me to a typical network architecture block diagram for this particular setup? Or even just suggestions, ideas etc?

Thanks!

Cheers,
Robert.
 
Last edited:
Thanks for the advice Dua Anjing - only thing is though is that this gear is second hand and my company does not typically deal with Schneider unfortunately.... :(

I have got the task of getting this stuff working.. and getting it working fast unfortunately!

Cheers,
Rob
 
OK, How many PLC's ? How many Citect PC's. If the PLC has an Ethernet Port then you should be able to use Modbus TCPIP ( I think this will be Quantum's default) And in Citect you can use the Communications Express Wizard to set up a Modbus TCPIP IOdevice. This is a very common combination. Citect's Help is OK but sometime syou need to wade thru a bit of muck to find the gems..
 
Well there will be maybe 12 PLCs on this network... And say maybe 10 HMI Citect viewer machines... and 1 SCADA server.

I envisage that the PLCs will all have two ethernet ports.. one will be for a PLC network for inter PLC comms, and one for a SCADA network. The data that is stored in the memory of the PLC will be read and collected by the SCADA server on the SCADA network and made available to the SCADA Citect viewer machines.

Does this sound feasible to you? Any better suggestions?

Thanks!
Rob
 
What I would do (please remeber this is only my suggestion and you will probably get more/better advice). Firstly the 10 Citect Viewer machines, do you want to be able to control the PLC from these ? (write data to the plc) if so then they will need to be "full" licences (no difference in cost to a "server") If so I would set up 2 Citects as a redundant pair of IOservers and I would put two network cards in each, One of these cards would have access to the PLC's and the other would be for the remaining Citect Clients. That way your PLC to PLC comms is separate from your Citect to PLC comms and that is separate from your Citect to citect comms.
 
That sounds like an interesting way to configure it...

Now excuse me if this sounds like a silly qn... but your reasoning for this particular arrangement is so that "your PLC to PLC comms is separate from your Citect to PLC comms and that is separate from your Citect to citect comms."

What exactly is the advantage of this comms separation?

Thanks.
Rob
 
if you need to update your project you will need to copy relatively large amounts of data between citect pc's. if you are doing this on a differnet subnet then you can be sure that it cannot effect your IOservers comm to your PLC's or you rplc to plc comms. On our system becaue of it's size we do not update/backup the "normal" citect way we copy the entire User folder (in our case approx 1.5 G) from development pc to citect pc's and then restart Citect, we also 'point our display clients to a common share on the domain and these clients will update them selves as necesaary. for the cost of a few nic's all of the "bandwith" intensive stuff is out of the way as far as plc comms is concerned.
Keeping the Citect to PLC comms as fast as possible may let you increase your trend update rates, depending on the protocol you use you may be able to trend data at 100 mSeconds per sample or less.
 

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