Hello,
I was wondering if someone could help me out here. Maybe it is not the right place to ask but I'm working on a internship project where I'm trying to figure out for the company if ignition is a suitable SCADA option. They are working with Siemens Tia Portal and did use the HMI of tia portal but want to use the HMI/SCADA of ignition in the future. I have already configured lots of stuff but the biggest problem that I'm facing is the way to get my siemens tags into ignition. It already worked for me with OPC UA but Siemens is getting a limited with the amount of tags that I can import and it seems like they don't know the error themselves. I was trying to make an MQTT connection to send all Siemens plc tags to the MQTT server but could not send whole tag lists to the server. the only thing that I managed to do was send a topic with a message to the server and that's it.
So I was wondering if someone has experience with large systems that are using for example Siemens PLCs that are configured in TIA Portal and using Ignition as SCADA software and know how to send large lists of tags to their Ignition SCADA .
Maybe someone knows a solution to the things I have tried above. Every kind of help is welcome.
Thanks for your help!!
With Siemens you have two options:
Set the OPC server on your PLC, then add it to Ingition in the OPC Connections, this should let you use your tag naming conventions, or;
Use the Ignition Siemens Driver, your tags will need to be put into Global DBs, where the optmised access is disabled, and you'll configure it using the DB number and offsets as in the document below:
https://docs.inductiveautomation.com/display/DOC81/Siemens
Depends which you prefer, many people like to use option 1 as you can use your normal tag naming and import the tags like other PLC drivers, but there are limits on number of tags you can use.
I tend to use option 2, but it takes a bit more planning on correctly configuring user defined types to make it efficient.
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okay that already worked for me. But after sending around 20000 nodes I got the error that ServerLegitimatedToLevel 1.
So I though that MQTT would be a great way to use but after using the LMQTT library of siemens I could only send one topic and message each time. Is there a way to send whole tag lists at once?
If I read on the internet they say that MQTT is a very popular way to transport data in industrial automation. how come there is no information on sending whole lists of tags to a MQTT server? If you have an industrial system you normally have more than at least 1000 tags and no one is going to publish those tags all one by one to the server let alone if you have 20000 tags. So how are people transporting so much data (tags) to the server and reading it in ignition? I'm confused because I've been trying to figure this out for the past 2 weeks and I can't find an answer.
Yes, you generally publish them individually. I imagine TIA Portal has some import/export tools that would let you script the changes in bulk.
Part of the appeal of MQTT is the dramatic reduction in comms traffic achieved by only reporting changes over the wire. The published data point is the item checked for change, so it must be a small payload for this to be practical. If you publish a thousand tags together, then any one of the thousand changing would cause the thousand to be transmitted, defeating the purpose of the "on-change" transmission strategy.
okay, that makes sense. thanks for the information.