Introduction People have been talking about downloading applications and libraries for automation developments from an “app store” for years. It’s finally here now. TIA Package Manager is an external application for TIA Portal from SIEMENS that helps streamline the package management. What’s more …

Introduction At different stages of our career we will encounter situations that the PLC undesirably “lose” the data that we want to retain. When such a situation happens, people will start to talk about using retentive memory and some people will start to voice concerns about the start values. …

Introduction I like to optimize things whenever I can and one thing that I will always suggest to the project that I am involved in is to stop using the stand alone power meters and start using the ET200SP power meter modules. Yes the power meters are fine and they do their jobs. However, with the …

Introduction At work my team and I often deal with quite complex and sizable PROFINET networks. With TIA Portal and PRONETA, we can definitely troubleshoot some network issues. However, if the network issue is intermittent, it will get trickier to troubleshoot. Hence the best way is to set some …

Introduction Quite often we need to break down some Tags and get certain information from it. For example, we want to get some characters from a barcode scanner’s read strings or we want the minutes of a date and time tag or we want a certain alarm bit from an alarm word. In TIA Portal, there are …

Introduction The built-in webserver is one of the most undervalued features of the S7-1500 PLCs. It can do so many cool things that I don’t even know where to begin with. So instead of talking about all the technical details, I will show you how to host the Chrome offline game t-Rex runner on it. …

Before we start, I want to say that the off the shelf TIA Portal’s library management features are not ideal compared to other more open source style brands like B&R’s Automation Studio. But given the history of the SIMATIC controllers, I can accept this imperfection. Hopefully in the future …

Before we start, I want to say that the off the shelf TIA Portal’s library management features are not ideal compared to other more open source style brands like B&R’s Automation Studio. But given the history of the SIMATIC controllers, I can accept this imperfection. Hopefully in the future …

Before we start, I want to say that the off the shelf TIA Portal’s library management features are not ideal compared to other more open source style brands like B&R’s Automation Studio. But given the history of the SIMATIC controllers, I can accept this imperfection. Hopefully in the future …

Introduction Organization blocks (OBs) are very important in programming the SIMATIC controllers but most of the engineers don’t use many of them other than OB1. I myself haven’t gone through all of the OBs either which creates a good chance for me to have a closer look at them now. This article …