Control Expert (Schneider) and Ignition

[Vena.Cava]

Hey all,

I’ve been working with V 15 of control expert and I have tried to get the Ignition gateway to connect with the simulated PLC program and I’ve been having troubles. When I use a physical PLC its able to connect and see the registers without issues. I’ve assigned the simulated PLC a network and IP but the modbus tcp drivers wont connect, assigning it all to the home NIC of 127.0.0.1 has also not worked. Any advice for a first time Modbus “Enthusiast”?

[pturmel]

Are other modbus tools able to connect? It might be a limitation of the simulator.

Rant: I don’t use the Schneider stuff, myself. It’s pretty sad when the heirs of the originator of the Modbus protocol doesn’t even implement one of its basic functions in current products. (The masked write function for holding registers, in particular.)

[Vena.Cava]

I haven’t tried that yet. This is my first time using Modbus and I have to say I’m not a fan.

[pturmel]

Modbus can be annoying. Having some kind of browsing available makes it less so....

Shameless self-promotion:

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[jay]

I have not installed V15 of Control Expert yet but on previous versions of Control Expert / Unity Pro I have been able to use the simulator just like a real PLC for testing Ignition and other HMIs. The simulator will run with the localhost address regardless of what you set the controller’s ethernet port configuration to. You’re not going to be able to talk with an NOE module set to another IP address, AFIK.

Is the Ignition gateway running on the same computer as the simulator? If not, make sure your firewall is letting port 502 through. As pturmel mentioned, use another simple Modbus tools to troubleshoot this first.

[Vena.Cava]

Yeah, the simulator and the ignition client are on the same machine.

@jay

You’re not going to be able to talk with an NOE module set to another IP address, AFIK.

so currently I can connect to it on 127.0.0.1 but for the network connection to the network I get an error for not having it set to an address between 1.0.0.0 and 126.255.255.255 or 128.0.0.0 and 223.255.255.255

what would you recommend as a simple modbus tool as this is my first time working with it and I'll take all the help I can get from kind strangers on the internet.

[Matrix_Engineering]

https://www.modbustools.com/download.html

[Vena.Cava]

for the pool tool do I connect to the home NIC 127.0.0.1 or the random private IP for the ethernet connection?

[jay]

The simulator effectively turns your PC into a Modbus TCP server. With a Modbus tool/client running on the same machine as the simulator use localhost ( or 127.0.0.1). If the Modbus client is on another machine, use the IP address of the PC running the simulator.