Best / Economical solution to connect to S7 PLC wirelessly?

[uptown47]

Hi,

I am looking into the possibility of giving our craft team the ability to program one of our production lines 'wirelessly'.

There are 7 separate machines on the production line and they all have S7-300 series PLCs.

We have more than one production line so this would be something I would ideally like to roll out to the other lines if it was successful.

In an ideal world I would also like some type of wireless hard drive storage (NAS?) that would hold the S7proj folder that the laptops would access if the craft team needed to work on a PLC.

That way all our software would be in one central location and we wouldn't have to rely on people archiving their software to USB sticks and leaving them in the panel (as we do now).

The main thing for now is getting the laptops to talk wirelessly to the PLC. Is their a retrofittable device that will plug into the MPI port and connect wirelessly to the laptop??

Also, would the best way be to make the production line into 1 network that the craft can connect to with a password and then program any machine? Or would it be better to have each machine with it's own password (i.e. it's own little network?)?

Really just looking on thoughts on how / if this is feasible?

I don't want to go down the route of buying an ethernet lean card for every rack and then running that to a wireless router because it would be too expensive and wouldn't get off the ground.

Any ideas? Or has anyone worked on anything similar?

Many thanks ;-)

 

[cjd1965]

I would be careful about this... I have known craft guys go online to the wrong machine !!! At least if they plug in you know it is the correct one.

 

[uptown47]

Yep. That was something we discussed. The guys are very good at doing a 'compare' before doing any work etc but, before we let them loose on anything wireless, there will be extra toolbox talks to ensure they understand what they are doing.

;-)

 

[cjd1965]

Westermo.co.uk and ****.biz offer ethernet routers that have MPI connections to your PLC so it could be worth looking into. I realise your looking for something 'local' but you can also connect from anywhere with a web connection to most of these units (think of a 2am phone callout)

I have used the 3G version of the **** /MPI with great success

**** = E W O N without the spaces

 

[uptown47]

Thanks for the links will check them out. Not sure why the site doesn't like the word e w o n ??

Maybe a sweary-type word in Swahili... ;-)

Thanks again for the info.

Cheers

;-)

 

[STL???]

Wireless Netlink?
http://www.helmholz.de/prod.d,80_92_94.html?p_id=116

 

[uptown47]

Thanks STL. I've just been in touch with E w o n and I like the sound of their Siemens Teleservice unit. They have an agent in the UK too which helps.

Thanks for your suggestion though, much appreciated.

;-)