TIA Portal 16 compatability with S7-1517F

Ken Roach

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Ken Roach
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I have been handed a control panel to commission with an S7-1500 in it, and I am the greenest of novices at Siemens products.

I have also been given a VMware virtual machine with TIA Portal 16 Update 3 installed.

When I select an S7-1517F for a new offline program, I can select no higher than firmware version 2.8.

But the online properties of the S7-1517F I have show that it has firmware version 2.9.4 installed. Release notes suggest that was released in December 2021.

Can I update/upgrade/install support for Version 2.9.x firmware into TIA Portal 16 ? If so, how ?

Or do I need to install TIA Portal 17 ?

Or should I try to download older (July 2020) firmware 2.8.3 into the S7-1517F ?
 
You probably don't need to change anything.
1500 CPUs generally have no problem running a project designated as a lower firmware revision. You will get a warning when downloading and a note in the system diagnostics, but unless you need some feature or bugfix in v2.9 you should not otherwise notice.
 
Thanks for the comments.

I think this might be related to having a Safety controller. It just says that the online and offline "articles" are different, and then fails the Load action.

I'm not able to get the v2.8 firmware for this controller yet because it evidently wasn't included with the installations that are on my VM and I have to wait for Siemens to manually approve me for export-controlled software.

I don't need to run the safety features at the start, I just need to do some very ordinary I/O checkout. I deleted all the ET200S safety I/O from the project but I think the firmware version of the actual controller vs. the one configured in the project is a dead end.

TIAPortal_DL_Failure.PNG
 
A bit of a facepalm there; I followed a link from the error message and found that I need an S7 Memory Card installed just to download to the S7-1517F.

Fortunately the designer of the system presumably knew that, which is why I found it in an envelope in a box of parts.

So my first download is complete, and now I get to work on the Safety I/O, including understanding why the designer used a safety output module to drive a stacklight.

Thanks again for the encouragement: I would have sat here waiting for Siemens to get back to me if you hadn't said "it shouldn't be a problem".
 
It's possible to "Downgrade" the Firmware on your S7-1516F CPU, you can find on siemens.com/SIOS, you'll need the MLFB.No. and you have to be registered to download the Firmware
 
Ken Roach said:
A bit of a facepalm there; I followed a link from the error message and found that I need an S7 Memory Card installed just to download to the S7-1517F.
Click to expand...

Memory cards are required for the 1500, it has no load onboard load memory and can only use the SD card. The card itself is upsettingly expensive considering the capacity.

The card is formatted to a Siemens specific file structure, so don't use windows to format it or you'll struggle to recover it.

If the card has a large enough capacity, you can use it to install a previous version of the firmware without having to jump through too many hoops. The minimum size is 4MB but the firmware files are slightly larger than that.

As previously commented though, you should be able to download a program compiled in an older firmware version without issue, it'll just give you a warning every single time.

Good luck with the safety, it took me a bit of reading and some youtube to produce a functional FDBACK block. I daresay you'll pick it up just a bit quicker than me though.
 
I recommend to keep the CPU FW2.9 even if the offline TIA project is configured with FW2.8.
There are several important bugfixes in FW2.9.
The only side effect from the difference between offline and online FW versions is the warning you get when loading the program.
 
Thank you all for the encouragement and guidance.

I have managed to get a program to compile and load, but I still can't get into RUN mode because of I/O configuration errors on the ET200S that we're using for machine I/O.

Time to learn in detail about the difference between light gray and dark gray.
 
Oh, and also important is that you use the same TIA version which the program was already made with.
If you convert to a newer TIA version, then your program and the original programmers program will then be different, and the original programmer will be unable to go online.
 
Ken Roach said:
Time to learn in detail about the difference between light gray and dark gray.
Click to expand...

Assuming you mean the base units, the first module must be light gray. The light gray is the start of a new potential group, dark gray is a continuation of that group. It explains it much better (with pictures) in the manual, but if you connect 24v to the light unit, it will power up the dark units to the right of it.

On the device configuration you can change which base unit you're using.
 
Ken Roach said:
Thank you all for the encouragement and guidance.

I have managed to get a program to compile and load, but I still can't get into RUN mode because of I/O configuration errors on the ET200S that we're using for machine I/O.

Time to learn in detail about the difference between light gray and dark gray.
Click to expand...


Are there any F modules on the ET200S?
 
Not that it helps much, but honestly all the PLC devices should have been setup and tested already at the panelbuilder, including all the IO hardware and the grey/dark base units, the PN devicenames, and the F-modules should have been baptized.
The panelbuilder should get all green lights before shipping. That would have caught any errors at an early stage where it would be much easier to fix.
Obviously does not include any field devices or connections to 3rd parties, but as much as is possible.
Our panelbuilder also does an IO test on all the IO that is in the control cabinets.
 
L D[AR2 said:
There are a few exceptions to the "rules" for the base units - RQ modules for example.
Click to expand...


Yeah. Learned it hard way once. Base units was mixed between different IO-cards. Nothing worked and lot of rewiring only because mixed base unit codes.
 

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