Profinet project/driver with similar ease as Advanced HMI?

[Noe]

I know Advanced HMI pretty well now. But now I am struggling with Profinet as all our new machines, because a new policy from management, has to have Siemens controllers.

I'd been developing small applications to communicate with Siemens, using Libnodave, but always get to the same point that after certain amount of variables being read, my UI start becomes sluggish or locking up for a brief moment. This is due I call the read variable subs based on a timer, so I can constantly refresh their read values. I've tried  to use background workers or threads, with no success. Still not giving up on this, but does someone knows any open source project or comercial driver that has a similar functionality than AHMI that does use multithreading?

AHMI does have a modbus TCP driver to communicate with Siemens (already tried that), but this solution is not what we need, it has to use Profinet.

I need to stop wasting time trying to find a way how to do something that has been already developed, and dedicate my time into my main task which is programming an application.

Sorry if all this sounds confusing, but with all my work load I have not been sleeping very well and now is starting to really affect me.

Just want to hear some recommendations on what to do with Siemens, as in a matter of months we received and launched more than 40 machines with it (with all that implies), and we lost the great development ease intended by Archie with AHMI. Now I can really appreciate the simplicity implied, like just drag and drop a basic label and do not have to worry for other things than developing your app.

I ask in this forum and not in other PLC specialized ones, as I've seen this place where people come to learn PLC and VB.NET programming, rather than just each one apart.

Any comments?

[baguinn]

I have the same problem, the only thing I have come up with is an OPC server. If using TIA, the datablocks have to be unoptimized so that they use absolute addressing to be able to read them. If using Classic (v5.x) they pull right in. It does add cost, then you have to get around DCOM issues if you use one remote server to host all your applications which you can do.

Hope this helps put you on a useful track.

[Noe]

Thank you. I've tested with Matrikon OPC, but to be honest it really falls short from AHMI features and specially, the integration with VB.net.

I have the same problem, the only thing I have come up with is an OPC server. If using TIA, the datablocks have to be unoptimized so that they use absolute addressing to be able to read them. If using Classic (v5.x) they pull right in. It does add cost, then you have to get around DCOM issues if you use one remote server to host all your applications which you can do.

Hope this helps put you on a useful track.

[aquilmustafa]

Hey Sprungmonkey,

In the old version of AdvancedHMI someone has included a libnodave and created a wrapper. Though it is not that good but yes it performs well with S7-1200 series of PLC. I might have kept a copy of that to create a workaround for those drivers.

[bachphi]

How about Ingear driver?
http://ehelp.ingeardrivers.com/s7link3/help/NET.S7LINK_Help.htm#Array_Example.htm

[Noe]

After a short break (breaks are always short, aren't they?), back to work.

I have not used Ingear drivers with my projects, but a developer we hired to create an application for recipe management and store result data did used it. Seems to work fine on most of the machines but for some reason fails to write a bit from time to time in some machines (very specific ones) that is used as an acknowledge. Nobody from Ingear or the application developer has been able to fix it or find the cause, but is a random issue and just happens once or twice a week. Besides that, it seems to work properly.

On the other side, I used libnodave for some small projects and hadn't used it anymore, but I kept looking for something better or easier to develop and found Snap7. It does have some differences that makes it easier than libnodave, the first thing is that I can read strings without having to create loops or decode manually characters, which is a feature I was looking for. It is very versatile, it can even kind of emulate a PLC communication (you can connect a HMI to your app!). I think it uses background workers to communicate with PLCs so it does not lock the UI. I will try to use it on my next project, and see how it goes.

In case you are interested here is the official site:
http://snap7.sourceforge.net/

By the way, the developer has done a great job with documentation, and there is a forum like this one to get help and support.
https://sourceforge.net/p/snap7/discussion/general/

How about Ingear driver?
http://ehelp.ingeardrivers.com/s7link3/help/NET.S7LINK_Help.htm#Array_Example.htm

[larryhts]

Sprungmonkey Thanks for the heads up about "SNAP7" . Looks like a good set for Siemens family.

Thanks again

[tatin]

Hi, I have been developing a driver for siemens using Snap7, if anyone is interested in using/test it I can share.

[Godra]

Hi, I have been developing a driver for siemens using Snap7, if anyone is interested in using/test it I can share.

Well, don't hesitate to post it since somebody might eventually try to use it.

[tatin]

Hello, I leave the link with the siemens driver using snap7, in front of any doubt I will try to help as much as I can since I am not an expert in .net programming, I do what I can. I have tested it with snap7's own simulator and with an S7-1500 PLC. (sorry my english is translated)

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1qkjWns0W4z6uQtiWrUeaWBJl4oHMxAaC

[Noe]

Hello, I leave the link with the siemens driver using snap7, in front of any doubt I will try to help as much as I can since I am not an expert in .net programming, I do what I can. I have tested it with snap7's own simulator and with an S7-1500 PLC. (sorry my english is translated)

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1qkjWns0W4z6uQtiWrUeaWBJl4oHMxAaC

Is this intended to be used with Advanced HMI?

[MEDALI1TN]

Hello, I leave the link with the siemens driver using snap7, in front of any doubt I will try to help as much as I can since I am not an expert in .net programming, I do what I can. I have tested it with snap7's own simulator and with an S7-1500 PLC. (sorry my english is translated)

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1qkjWns0W4z6uQtiWrUeaWBJl4oHMxAaC

Dear tatin.
Can use it with s7-300 or s7-400 ?

[tatin]

I hope this clarifies it, it is copied from the web http://snap7.sourceforge.net/

Siemens communications overview
 
Snap7, by design, only handles Ethernet S7 Protocol communications.
Why only Ethernet ?
Having said that we are not talking about the fieldbus, but we are focusing on PC-PLC communications, Ethernet has several advantages against Profibus/Mpi :
·         It’s faster, CP 1543-1 (for the newborn S71500) has a bandwidth of 1000 Mbps.
·         It's more simply to troubleshoot, in 50% of cases a "ping" is good enough to solve your problems.
·         It’s cheaper, you don’t need a special adapter to communicate (which, moreover, cannot not be used with any hardware and any virtual infrastructure as Snap7 does).
·         If you use Snap7Server, many more non-Siemens panels/scada can be connected with your software.
 
Siemens PLCs, through their communication processors (CP) can communicate in Ethernet via two protocols:
Open TCP/IP and S7 Protocol.
The first is a standard implementation of the TCP/IP protocol, it's provided mainly to connect PLCs with non-Siemens hardware.
TCP/IP is a generic protocol, it only states how the packets must be transferred, and it doesn't know anything about their content.
Finally, TCP/IP is stream oriented (though Siemens FC/FB needs to packetize the data stream into blocks).
As said, it is a standard, so you don’t need of Snap7 to use it, your preferred socket libraries are perfectly suitable.

[Fizsano]

Is a good way to find information on this website. New poster post.

[stevejobs27]

Hello all !
I am running the recently released Beta of AdvancedHMI, I struggled at first by "adding" the .vb forms etc as they resulted in lots of broken links. My favoured method which seems to have worked OK, was to simply re-create the CLXCOM driver links in the new empty project, and renamed them exactly as my original was (adding the correct IP address etc) - then I simply opened my old project inside a new instance of Visual Studio, and simply selected ALL on the page, copied and pasted into the new project... all the links were OK and its working OK (but I think - for me - it was important to have the COMMS drivers installed and setup first )
Steve