We have only one Siemens Safety Module (ET200S-IM151-8 F CPU) with WinCC. that we are planning to Migrate to Ignition. Our Rockwell PLCs Migration are under way. However we are facing problems with creating tags to replace WinCC. I have read the posts about S7300 but didn’t help.
First, many Siemens safety module DBs, FBs, FCs, etc. are password protected (Highlighted yellow in S7 program). Then the tags are mixed of E/A (I/Os) in symbol table and program containing tags such as DB00.DBX0.0, DB300.BDX200, etc.
The Siemens manual in Ignition doesn’t refer to using such a tags. Tech support asked us to create tags and by trail and error find the format we should be using. For example S7 program output, A0.0 in Ignition would it be OB0.0 or OX0.0? Then what format should we create DB300.DBX0.0 for Ignition.
The format for S7 tags is in the Ignition manual. The ET200S behaves like a standard S7-1500, so A0.0 is QX0.0 in Ignition, DB300.DBX0.0 is DB300,X0.0
Note that Ignition’s Siemens driver has no support for symbolic addressing, so you have to disable optimized access for data blocks you want to access from Ignition.
For the safety part: I really hope you are not planning to interact directly with safety data blocks from your HMI. There are rules what data can be accessed from the non-safe part of the application, those rules also apply for HMI access.
The password protection for F-blocks is a safety feature to prevent changes to safety functions. But why should you want to change the safety program from your HMI?
Thanks you for quick response Chi. Regarding password protection Blocks, we are not trying to assess them from HMI. Just was wondering if there would be a problem for Ignition to accessing the data within password protected Blocks.
I did look at the online manual you referred me to. It did have a little more information. However I don’t see how M0.0 is translated nor PAW300. Please see chart below:
SYMBOLE ADDRESS IGNITION DATA TYPE COMMENT
M0.0 M 0.0 MX0.0 BOOL Always 0
M0.1 M 0.1 MX0.1 BOOL Always 1
PAW300 PQW 300 PAW300 INT Water Valve 1
PAW302 PQW 302 PAW302 INT Water Valve 2
dfsdf WORD W# 16#0
Then there is the question of how to import Siemens .SDF to Ignition. All Dbs can be Imported with file extension .SDF
You can not access data within blocks. For function blocks (FBs) you access the instance data block that is programmed in the block call. But as i mentioned, there are special access rules for safety related data. If i remember right, it is ok to read data blocks from the safety program but you have to keep in mind that the this program is executed asynchronous.
The addressing of flags is described in the manual M0.0 = MX0.0 (Area Flags=M, Data Type Bool = X, address 0.0).
Direct periphery access like PAW (periphery output) or PIW (peripherie input) is not supported by Ignition. Apart from that, direct access to periphery addresses from a HMI is almost always a bad idea. Periphery access means that the processor stops what is is doing and tries to read the current state of the I/O module regardless of the program cycle.
You may check if PQW300 is in the processors output image. If this is the case, you can use QW300 (or QI300) instead. Of course this only works if PQW300 is a non-safe output.
There is no support for symbol import to Ignition. A few possibilities have been discussed in this thread. But: you don't want to import all data blocks to Ignition's OPC-UA server. The server will start to poll all imported tags, and polling all data blocks will probably overload your processor's communication ressources.
If this is the only Siemens processor, you may use the processor integrated OPC-UA server that is offered by Siemens. There are also 3rd party servers with full support for browsing, symbolic addressing and the new security mechanisms. The Ignition driver uses the backward compatible S7-300 mode of modern processors.