Hi.
I have an Siemens S7-1200 PLC with an onboard OPC UA server.
There's a recipe structure (datatype "Programma") which I expose on the OPC UA Server interface:
I am using this datatype "Programma" in multiple places.
It seems that the S7-1200 doesn't support to have the client read the whole datatype: Siemens S7-1200 Tag issues in 8.0.6 - #24 by Kevin.Herron
This is what it looks like in a client. Here you can also see the Node Id.
I'm wondering what's the best way to set up these structures in Ignition?
When I use the classic Siemens S7 driver, I could just build an UDT and offset the the DB number / Byte / Bit Address.
Like this:
But I'm not sure how to do this with OPC UA tags, since I think the only identifier is the Node ID... Which doesn't seem too "reliable" for me.
When I try to drag complete datatypes into the tags, it gives a "Bad error":
Single tags like booleans or integers, work fine.
Any suggestions on how to set this up properly for the OPC UA tags?
Sidenote:
I would also have to store these recipe's in a database on Ignition, to be able to compare recipe's from the database with recipe's on the PLC and show the differences.
Not sure if that's important in the approach...
Unfortunately there is no good solution here.
The "Server Interface" feature of the S7-1200 uses numeric NodeIds rather than predictable ones, and the structured value as a whole remains unreadable in current versions of Ignition.
I think you'll have to manually create folders and bring in the tags for each of the structures you're interested in.
In Ignition 8.3 the OPC UA implementation has support for the DataTypeDefinition attribute in addition to the legacy DataType Dictionary, so in the future you'll be able to at least bring the whole top level structured value in as a Document and then slice and dice your data from that.
Too bad to hear that!
Is it because of the S7-1200 PLC (instead of S7-1500)? Or because of Ignition?
Any idea when Ignition 8.3 will become available? Since this is for a new project so I might be able to wait a bit...
Manually creating those tags seems to be like a lot of work...
So maybe the old Siemens driver would still be the best way to go for this project...
I think if you use the standard "SIMATIC Interface" it make work, though I can't remember if that's available on the 1200 or just the 1500.
Using the Siemens driver is an option. Absolute addressing is annoying to configure but at least it's predictable.
Ignition 8.3 is due early next year.
