Looking for WinCC flex alternative (cost efective)

Hello all.
I mainly work with Siemens PLC's and panels for our machines. But now I am faced with a pilot project that has to be as price friendly as possible.


This pilot project must consists of a machine that needs to log and store values from the process(PLC) to the PC (PC is a must) in csv format or directly xls, so that the technician will be able to open the csv on this computer and see the production info.



So my first thought was a S7-1200 PLC and WinCCflexRT license and logging license to visualize the machine and log the data. But the licenses are well over 1k€.



So is there an alternative to WinCC Flexible RT that I could use in this project? The PLC must be a S7-1200 because of some other profinet nodes.



Any input would be great. Thank you.
Cheers
Aleix

Call Inea from Ljubljana and ask them for SoftGOT solution. Regarding S7-1200, you can use S7 communication or there are some addons for Profinet.

How about free ?


With S7-1200 you can log data to a CSV file on its own flashcard, and then allow the data to be copied from the S7-1200 by it internal webserver.


https://support.industry.siemens.com/cs/de/en/view/64396156


Excel can open CSV files. You dont have to convert to Excel first.

Since you meantion WinCC Flexible.
A 128 tags runtime license will be half the price you quoted or less.
You dont need a logging license. You can log data by VBS scripting.


Not free, but less expensive and it keeps you with the software that you are acquainted with.

JesperMP said:

How about free ?


With S7-1200 you can log data to a CSV file on its own flashcard, and then allow the data to be copied from the S7-1200 by it internal webserver.


https://support.industry.siemens.com/cs/de/en/view/64396156


Excel can open CSV files. You dont have to convert to Excel first.

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Hello.
This was the first thing that I proposed(have done lots of machines with s7-1200 dataloging), but they rejected it because it needs to stored directly on the PC. Also when they heard that the data will be stored on a 24MB card and the price of this card they said no way. Couldn't persuade them that 24MB is more than enough.
So I am stuck on finding a good cost friendly solution. The irony is that for what ever the alternative will be cheaper, I will have more work to do. In the end when I sum up all my extra hours of work it will be the same if we would go with Wincc Flex instead of some other software...


Thanks for input guys.


@goghie - thanks I will try to see what they can offer me.

NoName said:

The irony is that for what ever the alternative will be cheaper, I will have more work to do. In the end when I sum up all my extra hours of work it will be the same if we would go with Wincc Flex instead of some other software...

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Have you given them the option with a cost attached to each? Also worth pointing out the cost of service or troubleshooting of a well known solution versus something a bit more exotic that you need to read a manual each time you look into it.

How many tags do you need to log and at what frequency ?

Snap7 and a custom program running on the PC, Snap7 is free, all you will invest is time to make the data logging program, but its simple-ish, its just a loop that reads the tags/DBs that you need and write that into a file, csv is just data separated with commas, and Excell will open that up nicely.

Not sure what the pricing is on the many OPC servers out there (used to be about £600-700, but ones like Kepware have datalogging to SQL, would be easy to log the information into an SQL server Express on a PC, then use Excel to produce reports, have done this many times, well tested on SQLEXpress but pointed it to an SQL Server on the main system.
Once the DB is up & running, just create an excel template to query the DB & load the data, using VBA to format it into a report is pretty simple.
For example, batch data would have fields like batch number or date/time, this would be used as the look up for a particular report. Then create a selection dropdown an example report may contain the following as the report:
01062021001 so all rows with that batch number are returned to the spreadsheet the batch number (equivalent to a file name if you were using csv files) consists of the date & a batch number (001 to 999) so the query would load all batch numbers on that date, then the batch required could be selected & loaded into the spreadsheet & formatted.
The one thing is to ensure all batch numbers are unique using date & time will mean it never repeats.

What about JMobile from Exor, a Runtime PC License is £395 from Scatts.co.uk and Development license is £150 for 3. Will log to CSV and give you siemens Protocols and HTML5 graphics.

- > Speak to Scatts ask for Gary Spokes.

https://www.exorint.com/en/software/jmobile

Or Codesys with WebVisu and Siemens and SQL drivers - Cost may be a bit more though

NoName said:

The irony is that for what ever the alternative will be cheaper, I will have more work to do. In the end when I sum up all my extra hours of work it will be the same if we would go with Wincc Flex instead of some other software...

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There is a saying for this, it goes something like "You can't afford free software."

drbitboy said:

There is a saying for this, it goes something like "You can't afford free software."

Click to expand...

I read in some article years ago about a company whose motto was "we make free software affordable".

JesperMP said:

How many tags do you need to log and at what frequency ?

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Hello.
Thanks guys for the useful input.


Regarding the logging of the tags. I need to log 16 tags every cycle of the machine that will be aprox. 10secs. The logs will be alt least 30 secs apart because the operator hast to change insert new parts to the machine.


Cheers
Aleix

NoName said:

Regarding the logging of the tags. I need to log 16 tags every cycle of the machine that will be aprox. 10secs. The logs will be alt least 30 secs apart because the operator hast to change insert new parts to the machine.

Click to expand...

16 tags every 30 seconds.
You can do that easily with VBS in WinCC Flexible.
If I were you and already using WinCC Flexible, I know what I would do.