Hi, I’m reading the user manual for ignition 8 about siemens addressing, but I can’t understand how to create the “OPC Item Path” for a variable in an DB… the variable is this…
it is the DB63… so my path starts like… “[DeviceName]DB63,”… it is a real datatype so it continue like…"[DeviceName]DB63,REAL" but then i don’t understand how to point to the specific tag I mentioned.
I hope that someone can explain me this specific example to understand completely this topic.
You can’t address items in an optimized data block. Ignitions Siemens driver is a bit outdated and uses a legacy protocol. See this article for instructions if you really have to use this driver. Those instructions disable security mechanisms and influence performance.
There are 3rd -party OPC servers with full support for modern Siemens plus.
If you can look past the 90s website, these guys seemed to know what they were doing when I met them in Nuremberg a couple years ago: https://www.tanindustrie.de/en/Opc.php
They have support for browsing, optimized blocks, etc…
Yes, I am using the Tani server with Ignition and it works really good considering they had to reverse engineer the protocol. Support is also very fast.
The only missing feature I know is support for password protected plcs.
I tried to use Tani server and also Kepware to obtain the siemens plc tags automatically … but it didn’t work… or at lease I couldn’t do it…
But… I finally made it… I just want to share how I achieve the siemens addressing… well i had to do some changes to my PLC like the next mentioned:
in the PLC configuration General>Protection & security>Connection mechanisms we need to mark the option “Permit access with PUT/GET communication from remote partner”.
and download to device hardware and software (all) in order to refresh this property to the plc.
And like a help in the DB its a good option to unmark the DB attribute of “Optimized block access” in the DB properties
and the DB then will show the tag offset and looks like this…
so in my example i wanted to addressing the “TiempoCicloData” tag… so it end like this…
I really hope it will works for someone else… and that you can understand me …
Have a Nice Day!!
This is exactly what is described in the document linked above. But keep in mind that enabling Put/Get Communications makes your Plc open for security risks. Disabling optimized data blocks will influence your processor’s performance.
What problems did you have with Tani? It worked out of the box for me without any changes to the Plc.
