Wonderware and Modbus+

[tomneth]

Hi all,
I'm upgrading our Wonderware from ver. 5.1b running on a Windows 3.1 machine to WW ver. 7.1 on a Win NT4 (SP6) machine with an ISA SA85 card (Modbus Plus). This machine also has an internet connection via an ethernet NIC card. I loaded Modicon's MB+ Driver Suite 4.20 and was able to see all the nodes in our network. Then I loaded Wonderware and it's license. Next I loaded our existing application at which time WW converted it to this 32 bit version and all seemed well. Then I loaded WW's MB+ I/O server and entered the topics, slave path's and stuff the same as the old version was. I thought everything was going well but was not getting any live data. I viewed the Event Log and it said CARD SA85:0 Not Found, Bad NCB_LANA_NUM device not found. So I tried changing the address on the card (and in the MBX configuration) from D0000 to D8000 then C8000 and I get a message on startup that there was a driver failure. The Event log says "Test validating that MbpDrv0 was really a Modbus Plus adaptor card failed. The device is assumed not to be a Modbus Plus device and will be deleted." So what the hay am I doing wrong here? Should I just keep trying different addresses for the card or is there something else I'm missing here?

 

[Jim Dungar]

Reaching in dark

Have you tried reloading the Modbus+ Suite? Maybe the order in which they are loaded is important.

The Modbus+ Suite driver for the SA85 card allows the 16 bit Modicon application to work with 32 bit operating systems. This driver might need to be turned on for it to work. My old version of NetLib had to be told to start automatically, normally I start it manually when I need it.

 

[tomneth]

Yes Jim, I did reload the MB+ drivers and set the address back to D0000. Then I got a different error message then when I loaded it first (before Wonderware) something about an overlapping address. I didn't have as much time to work on it today but I'm thinking that there's something in WinNT that has to be set. Either that or maybe Wonderware's MB+ server is using a different name for the driver? It seemed odd that I got a different error message after reloading the MBX suite then the first time. And I don't recall any error message when I loaded the MBX suite, resarted the computer and was able to see all the PLC's on the network.

 

[tomneth]

Well I got the system to work today. After checking the win32 system I noticed the MB+ driver was missing (the NT system did say it was going to delete it yesterday). So I reloaded WW Modbus+ I/O server and got the same error messages as yesterday. Then I checked the MBX driver, which I had set to autostart, set it to manual start and stopped it. Rebooted and BINGO, all systems go!!! I guess I was under the mistaken impression that I needed the MBX driver and needed it to be running. Well I'll find out when I load the next machine. Many many thanks to Jim Dungar for setting me in the right direction.