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 …

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 …