It's like $300 or something... but yes, the licensing terms of the comms library requires us to sell it separately.
I would press on figuring out why you need to power cycle the PLC. Get Siemens involved if needed.
The 1200 series is pretty underpowered when it comes to the built in OPC UA support, so if you're using 1200s in prod too, then it might turn out the Siemens Enhanced driver performs better, or at least allows you to access more tags than the couple thousand limit for the S7-1200 OPC UA server.
We are using S7-1513 Pro F-2s on the production line machines.
Unfortunately at this point we have 18 ignition licenses we not only need to spend the money to upgrade from 8.1 to 8.3 we also need to add the additional cost of the Siemens Enhanced Driver for each of these gateways. That is unfortunately going to be too cost prohibitive to continue down this path.
We have 18 individual gateways (several of them have 3 vision clients) that are basically finished, re-addressing hundreds if not thousands of tags to use direct addressing, not to mention the PLC changes required (My understanding is we need unoptimized DBs), is also not feasible as a solution. Like I mentioned we are in discussion with ignitions support about why we are dropping communications with the Siemens OPC server for random tags during online logic changes, and the only way to repair the comms is to power cycle the PLC.
it could be anything from just a simple logic change, to a new tag in a DB, to an entirely new DB that’s not even referenced in Ignition. We haven’t had a chance to narrow down our scenarios that are causing us issues.
We always just chocked it up to ignition polling for too many tags, but started noticing it happening on simple logic changes as well.
It’s not always the same tags, we have seen it where even tags of the same DB some work some dont.