I’m trying to connect a Siemens S7‑1200 PLC to Ignition. I have enabled PUT/GET on the PLC and set the access level to Full Access.
On the Ignition side, I created the device connection and entered the PLC’s IP address in the Host Name field. The connection status shows Connected.
However, when I open the Quick Client, I don’t see any PLC tags.
Is there an additional setting or step required to make the tags visible?
Thanks.
Are you using an OPC Connection, or one of the siemens drivers? If one of the drivers, which one?
To use the s7-1200 over opc ua, you will need to set up the tags on the interface in the plc.
And, are you able to map tags in the designer?
The classic Siemens driver does not have browsable tags, you have to enter them manually.
The Enhanced Siemens driver in 8.3 or the OPC-UA direct connection are browsable, but they do not use the PUT/GET system.
Dear Jasmine,
This is the driver I used for the connection. For the hostname, I only entered the PLC’s IP address.
I’ve previously used Kepware OPC with this PLC, and everything worked correctly — the tags were fully browsable.
After researching online, I found that Ignition requires using non‑optimized DBs and mapping I/O values into DB variables before they can be accessed. I attempted this approach, but so far I haven’t had any success.
Thanks
Thanks David,
as I mentioned to @Jasmine_Quick , I have used this driver at gateway.
2 questions:
1- how we can insert them manually? I am not very sure what is the correct format of tag insert to ignition?
2- Also what is the Enhanced driver of Siemens? I did not see anything about it at Gateway to define.
Thanks
In case it isn't clear, the Enhanced Siemens driver is a new feature in Ignition v8.3.
Thanks
I’ve gone through the enhanced driver user manual, but I’m not seeing a lot of those fields it shows in that documentation. The method of adding the S7 Driver does not seem to follow the documentation. Has it changed in 8.3.4?
I’m using an S7-1214F and it’s not connected. From the PC my gateway is installed on, I can ping the PLC without issue.
Any suggestions?
Are you using the Siemens Enhanced Driver or the S7-1200 Driver?
There are docs for both-
Enhanced:
S7-1200:
I have tried both the Enhanced driver for 8.3 as well as the standard driver from 8.1, neither driver would communicate with the S71200.
The Manual for the enhanced driver does not actually match the procedure I have to follow for 8.3.4 to add the device to my gateway.
I would suggest you contact support, I have used all these drivers with the S7-1200 and succeeded with little hassle every time, so there would likely be an issue with the PLC setup that is hindering you.
I just gave it a quick sanity check, and it looks ok. Can you share more details about what seems to be missing?
“4.On the Select Driver form, select Siemens Enhanced Driver and click Next.”
I see nothing that states it’s the “Siemens Enhanced Driver” (See attached image)
”6.Under Device Settings, select your Device Type.
S7-1500
S7-1200
S7-300
S7-400
“
I do not see this option anywhere on this screen. (I do understand that I chose it before based on the above screenshot, but when it’s not working and I’m verifying that I’ve followed the steps from the vendor to integrate this into our system and the steps do not seem to match what I’m doing, it makes me wonder where the mismatch is. Am I missing an setting, has it changed since the documentation was created, etc)
I see nothing in the documentation about anything I need to do on the PLC side of things, but the communications between igniton and the S7-1214F are getting rejected by the PLC.
It seems you do not have the Siemens Enhanced driver module installed.
So, how do I install the Siemens Enhanced driver module? I literally downloaded the latest version of ignition 8.3.4 yesterday from your website, I assumed as it was a new feature of 8.3 it would be installed with it. Is there a separate download link?
Search or scroll down here: Current Ignition Release | Inductive Automation
It is not installed by default with 8.3.4, though I thought it might have been presented as optional in the installer, but maybe not.
It is in the zip installer, so presumably in the executable installer too. It is probably marked optional due to the slight extra license fee. (Terms of the underlying library, IIUC.)
We are just trialing 8.3 at this point, currently we are using OPC-UA as our method of pulling tags into Ignition (8.1 is on the production machines), but we are finding that the Siemens OPC-UA server appears to be crashing, when we do PLC modifications (no tag changes, just logic changes in the PLC), some objects on the vision clients error out and go red. We opened a ticket with your support team regarding this, and they said a potential solution was using the Siemens Enhanced Driver. The only solution we have to solve this issue is to power cycle the Siemens PLC (which we can’t really do while running production).
Currently I am testing this potential solution on an S7-1214F we are using on a machine unrelated to the projects we are having issues with.
Are you saying that in addition to purchase the upgrade licensing from 8.1 to 8.3 we also need to purchase the Siemens Enhanced Driver as well?
Yes.
Go here, scroll down to "More Connectivity". I hope that doesn't break the budget.
