Introduction One of the most exciting applications in the realm of industrial automation is motion control. It never gets old seeing your machines flying and doing everything nice and smooth. When it comes to SIEMENS motion control, one of the solutions is the technology object. It is mostly useful …

Introduction NTP time synchronization can be crucial to automation systems if the system uses time stamps between PLCs or the PLC and the IT systems. However, NTP time synchronization error normally is silent and people may have to spend hours trying to troubleshoot the issue only to find out that …

Introduction I have seen many cases where there are multiple PLCs using the same program and the only difference between them is their communication configurations. In most of these cases, engineers have to manually change the PLCs’ communication configurations and download the hardware …

Introduction Sending emails using a PLC is a big foot in the control automation world: lots of people have heard about it but rarely anyone has ever seen it. In this article, I’ll demonstrate the process to send emails with a PLC. In my demonstration, I’m doing the entire process through the …

Introduction Trace is the most important commissioning tool in TIA Portal and it offers many cool features that can simplify our analytical works. However, I can barely see people using any more trace features than the most basic continuous trace even though they should. In this article, I am going …

Introduction The SIEMENS S7 PLCs are not time deterministic systems, which means the PLC cycle time fluctuates based on how much work it processes. This is a significant difference from many time deterministic systems like Rockwell (Allen-Bradly) and B&R with which you can specify each PLC …

Introduction PLCSim Advanced is one of the best PLC simulators in the world and the PLCSim Advanced API is one of the reasons. In this article I will first introduce what is PLCSim Advanced API and provide a simple demonstration of it. What is PLCSim Advanced API PLCSim Advanced API (application …

Introduction In another article I introduced the S7-Routing that allows us to access any devices in different subnets as long as they support S7-Routing. A very natural question is what if the device that we want to access does not support S7-Routing (not from SIEMENS)? Well the answer is here with …

Introduction One of the cool features of PROFINET is the shared device. Not a lot of people know about it but anyone who happens to have an issue that the shared device can help, it can easily become a game changer. So what is a shared device in PROFINET and how to use it? Let’s find out …

Introduction The SIEMENS PN/PN coupler is a gateway device that can connect two separated PROFINET subnets together. It allows the two subnets to exchange certain data but prevents the two subnets’ devices from accessing the other side. While most of the engineers know how to use the synchronous …