Have I told you guys how much I hate programming using Step7 today?

[Jeebs]

I have partially figured out my problem. The SFCs don't come with labels. I assumed they did because the SFC have IN0 and IN1. The on-line documentation had LADDR and ANY. We are just supposed to know that IN0 is really LADDR. I was trying to get the LADDR label to show up in my program.

First of all, delete the SCF13 in your Blocks-folder

Open OB1 > Create new Network > If you don't have a lefthand pane, press ctrl+k. (substitute OB1 for any other block if needed)
In the lefthand pane, navigate to > Libraries > Standard Library > System Function Blocks.
Scroll down till you find SCF13. Double click it.

If I do it like that I'll get a nice DPNRM_DG call with following parameters:

REQ
LADDR
RET_VAL
RECORD
BUSY

This will also automatically insert the SFC13 into your Blocks-folder. I suspect you first copied the SCF13 from somewhere else, then created the call.....

 

[rootboy]

The 90-70 did at one time too.

Ah, I wasn't aware of that.

This is the question. What makes anyone think that this is a tuning problem? If the control output is getting close are at 100% there is nothing you can do to heat the barrel up faster except to get more or more powerful heaters.

No, it's not that they take too long to heat up, it's that they overshoot their setpoints and then it takes another hour to cool down enough to run.

Hopefully a good junk of that is memory image.

That is too much code for an injection molding machine. The injection part can be done in a day. Tuning the temperature PIDs just requires a little fussing with the gains but 20 or so zones shouldn't take that many rungs.

It's a VersaPro thing, the first listing was printed to a file in postscript format. Not too useful.

My second attempt was printed to a "text" printer and came out just shy of 1 gig in size.

Aren't there symbols or tag names.

These were nicknames. And there are nearly no rung comments whatsoever.

I took a break from the Step7 today. I worked on writing example programmers for our controller. It was like goofing off by comparison.

Currently, I *am* goofing off.

But we added some subroutines to tweak the PID Friday and tested them. Things looked really good for the first trial. Monday we will do some more tweaking and I hope to have it finished by the end of the night.

 

[dahnuguy]

Yes you could complain about Allen Bradley, but that would AFTER you were done with the program, probably in an hour or two for a simple edit including extra time for not knowing where stuff is already.

With Step7 you simpley can't get anything to work for DAAAAAYSSSSS and then finally you trip over some obscur item or check box or someone answers your question here.............and then your on to the next several day hunt.........this has been my experience for several weeks now. And I am not done yet.

I could have done it in AB in a week easy. Like 10 hours a day, not 12 and 16 hours a day.

I get the whole "it does cool stuff" arguement, but geeez there is a limit.

S7 has got to be the most counterintuitive and user hostile PLC software ever.

The old dos based GE FANUC is easier to use.

Yeah I like the neat stuff in S7 , but I just want to get something DONE and stop sightseeing through mountains of uninformative "documentation" and books and still have no idea where I am.

On the up side, once I do learn my way around S7 I will be in a small group with a high barrier to entry.

Should be a couple jobs around here with S7.

 

[JRW]

Wow, Now I thought you said you read the manuals and
were good.

 

[dahnuguy]

I really want to like S7 ..............no really.

Wow, Now I thought you said you read the manuals and
were good.

Read, as in past tense? No , I continue to read everything I can find several times over and try to imagine where the left out little piece of information might be and where I should look next.

While I think it is great that you guys are all here and are so helpful, it says allot about a product that the users have banded together and rely on each other to impliment the product.

I have no idea if there is a forum for using a Maytag washing machine for example.

I never did actualy write programs in assembly, which is probably why I expect so much from expensive software. I suppose if I had used assembly and PROMs for a couple years , I would be all impressed and have a different perspective.

Now back to the 313C and PID loops and some 7 or 8 mystery errors that keep the SF light on.

 

[JesperMP]

I think you have a case of the Stockholm syndrome.

 

[L D[AR2P#0.0]]

Is that available by the bottle ?

 

[Andybr]

Jesper.

The Wikipedia page you posted might not be entirely accurate but it is at least up to date. The last two people listed in the examples section are actually characters from a current storyline in a popular British soap opera.

Andybr

 

[radfahrer]

Resurrecting a long dead thread here briefly, but wanted to respond to some of the posters who ask "what's the point" of threads like this, and I just wanted to say I LOVE these types of threads. I just got reassigned on a contracting position and need to come up to speed with Siemens, and I'm blown away by how bad it is...and my ancestry is half German , so I want to give the Germans the benefit of the doubt, but this product is stuck in 1985 when it comes to usability and just programming concepts in general, I mean needing to use pointers to do array references, compiling to STL so uploads aren't in the original language if you don't have the source, only showing one FC in runtime at a time? It's obvious it was built 30 years ago by computer engineers who had all 150 assembler instructions of their processor memorized and thought STL was the bomb...but come on Siemens, invest a little in trying to keep your product up to date...I mean in 30 years it doesn't look like they tried to modernize this stuff at all...so it's all well and good if you want your chemical plant programmed by a Comp. Sci guy who has no idea how a heat exchanger works, but for an automation engineer like me who has a Chem E. degree and has never written assembler, this is just the worst product I've seen.

So I love these threads, because when I see a seasoned poster like Peter Natchway hating this stuff as much as me, I don't feel so alone in my struggle...it helps me power through it, and these threads also usually end up with a lot of useful tips from the Siemens experts trying to defend the product they've grown up on and have learned to love...which is fine too...as one poster said, it's great job security since it's so hard to learn, but what blows me away is how relatively common this stuff is despite how bad it is, especially outside of the US from what I hear...

 

[PLC]

just stick with your AB and quit digging up old rants

 

[radfahrer]

Oh and what's with showing all REAL's in exponent form? Is it that hard to show 13.5 as 13.5 and not 1.350000e+001? Talk about making mistakes much more likely. Or maybe there's a way to change that view?

For those who will flame me for complaining before I really even know this product, I'll admit that's a valid criticism...but I've got the Hans Berger book on order so I'll be making an effort to educate myself soon, and hopefully my frustration will go down over time and I won't need to search for "Siemens sucks" quite as often!

 

[boneless]

Well, they are doing a big push towards TIA nowadays.

Compared to the older versions of TIA, step 7 is a dream. It is slowly getting better.

I have not got much comparison, not worked on AB PLC's yet. Did some old Omron and Mitsubishi stuff couple of years ago, compared to that I love Siemens.

 

[mk42]

but come on Siemens, invest a little in trying to keep your product up to date...I mean in 30 years it doesn't look like they tried to modernize this stuff at all...

Siemens has come out with some new software (Tia Portal) and hardware (1200/1500) in the past couple years that do address a good number of the major annoyances that the 300/400 series had: you can program array indexing in ladder, when you upload the program it actually comes up with tag names&comments, you can actually detect the HW in the local rack so you don't need to find all the part numbers manually. One of the hoge ones for me: You can finally save while there are errors in your code (though you obviously can't download).

It isn't all roses, new products introduce new annoyances. All I'm saying is that at least they did finally try to do SOMETHING, and it's a huge step forward.

 

[parky]

I cut my teeth on Siemens in the days of S5, I think the S7 programming software sucks, so bulky, slow & takes ages to install but the concept is still brilliant as with S5, they were the first to use what is now known as IEC in a roundabout way, to be honest I believe they probably had most input into the IEC concept S5 in it's day was way ahead of the others and easy to use if you understood what could be the equivalent of Machine code.
I actually found instructions that are not in any manuals, I think Siemens kept them close to their chest, I once looked into some code that was almost completely stored in datablocks, the RS instruction using the MC5 code stored in memory was very powerful for example if you loaded a dataword that contained a hex value equivalent to an MC5 instruction the did RS instruction it would run that as an instruction for example if the MC5 instruction for and input 0.0 was 25C0 hex the loading that into the acc and doing the RS instruction it would be the same as and I 0.0, I can't remember the MC5 code now so the above is only an example so I don't want some clever clogs saying I have the instruction wrong, anyway it means by setting the MC5 code in datawords you could make the code change on the fly (very dangerous) but I tried it and it works.

 

[Peter Nachtwey]

Wow, you dug up an old thread. My blood pressure dropped a bit once we got ProfiNet working. ProfiNet required less programming and less customer support. I still think Step7 is a curse on programmers.

Can Step7 S7-300 programs be convert to TIA Portal or is TIA Portal only for S7-1200 and S7-1500?