Advanced HMI as soft-PLC?

[joechlimoun]

Can Advanced HMI be used as a soft-PLC using Allen Bradley remote I/O?

I'm sure this is possible with Modbus/TCP, since the dev environment is completely flexible and any logic can be done once the I/O is pulled in.  But can it be used to talk to a string of Flex I/O behind a 1794-AENT?  Is the Ethernet/IP driver implemented such that it can replace a controller and pull data directly from remote I/O?

If not, are there any plans to do this?  Seems like it could open a new avenue for Advanced HMI as a total logic and visualization package.

[Archie]

The Ethernet/IP driver does not support IO messaging necessary to be a scanner.

The difficulty with making it a PLC controller is that .NET nor windows is real time therefore the response could get as bad as several seconds, depending on what Windows decides is priority. Some companies have developed a real time kernel for windows, but that is a whole other animal.

In the future there may be a possibility of a driver that makes AdvancedHMI an Ethernet/IP adapter to a scanner like the 1756-ENBT

[Andrea_HMI]

Hello,

About this topic,
If the data I need to read from a remote slave ethernet IP, are not time critical,
Could I use the advancedHMI to read them directly?
The pourpose is just for demonstration.
Thanks

[Archie]

With CIP (Ethernet/IP) ,there are Class 1 and Class 3 type of connections. Class 3 responds to a request, while Class 1 sets up a periodic exchange of data. Class 1 is typically used for IO connections, while class 3 is used for HMI style connections.

AdvancedHMI only uses class 3 and cannot setup a periodic exchange of data as typically used for dumb IO. The drivers also use specific service codes for reading tag values from a PLC, therefore it cannot read the IO from a dumb IO, such as FlexIO or PointIO.

The short answer is that AdvancedHMI can only exchange data with a PLC processor and not an IO rack.