Siemens WinAC

[mcisaac]

Hello all!

I am working on trying to use a Siemens WinAC instead of a S7-317 PN/DP when testing applications against a Beijer (Mitsubishi Electric) E-1101 panel. WinAC is configured with WinLC in slot 2 in the Station Configuration and an IE General (PCMCIA network card) in slot 3. The configuration is also done in STEP 7 to correspond to the Station Configuration.

Now I want to connect the panel with the PC but panel is going crazy. It show comm errors and tries to access non-existing blocks etc. The panel is using a Siemens driver called "S7 ISO over TCP/IP" that works perfectly with the S7-317.

Does anyone have experience in using WinAC and maybe even the E-1101 panel?

 

[JesperMP]

Hi mcisaac.

You did not state which software is on the Beijer PC, but I assume that it is not from Siemens.

You may be out of luck.
I tried to setup a system like yours, but with Simatic Net on what would be your Beijer panel.
It turns out that WinLC only supports connections of the types "S7" or "Profibus FMS". "ISO on TCP" is not supported.

Can the software that you are using use an S7 connection, or can it use OPC ?

edit:
It just dawned on me that the Beijer panel may not be a PC, but a dedicated HMI panel. If that is the case, you can probably not use OPC.
I just jumped to the assumption that it was a PC.

 

[mcisaac]

Hello.
Yes, the Beijer panel is a dedicated HMI. These are normally installed in the machines together with the S7-317 but during testing there is of course no I/O connected. The reason for my test is to find out if the cheaper WinAC could be used instead of the more expensive hardware PLCs. For the final installation there will still be a hardware PLC. Because of this, I don't want to change the way of connecting to the panel too much.

Probably there are some limitations in the Siemens driver in the Beijer panel that causes the errors I get. But I thought that if someone else might had used WinAC in a similar way maybe have seen these errors before.