I have a customer who has mostly AB equipment, but a couple of robots with Siemens PLCs. The Siemens programmers have set up some tags which I am reading into an Ignition 8.3 environment. I would like to send a couple of pieces of that data to an Allen-Bradley PLC.
Historically the way I’ve done this is with a Profinet to Ethernet/IP gateway, but that seems overkill for just half a dozen tags which essentially amount to “Siemens robot #3 is running, AB machine #3 can outfeed into it” when I have Ignition right there.
Is there a “best practice” way to bounce the data from the Siemens tags into the AB PLC? I know that I could do a change script on the Siemens tags to write to some AB tags, but I’m wondering if there’s something a little more elegant that can set up an OPC tag that is “bound” to another OPC tag, or similar.
If there’s not a specific “best practice” way, how do you normally solve this problem*, and why do you choose this method over other possible methods?
*other than “use a profinet to ethernet/IP gateway”
Somehow I knew you’d show up soon with a solution involving your integration toolkit. Less than two minutes is impressive though
Edit: wait, is the toolkit free? I thought all of your modules were paid. I don’t think I’d have any luck trying to convince the client to pay for a module when I can do it with half a dozen tag change scripts for free, but if it’s a free module, that might change the picture…
Phil's Integration Toolkit is available in Edge as well too, so you don’t have to worry about needing to have different code for edge vs standard (most 3rd party modules aren't authorised for installation on Edge)
We've unfortunately often run into a wall of 'no third-party modules' that many clients require. So when I've run into this issue in the past I just had a folder of read tags from device1 and a folder of write tags to device2. Set up a gateway event for tag change and when the read tag changes have it copy the values to the write tag folder. Add a tag like clock seconds and trigger the read/write based on that.
Some caveats: Any safety shutdowns should be hardwired signals. And the soft tags being written across should not be relied on for time-precise executions that require specific orders of bits coming in for logic. But if it's a simple run permissive then it's not a concern.
Oh I know, it's just the way some clients go is why I mentioned it.
One client we'll propose a software that's a one time fee of $1,000 and their first response is can we find a cheaper alternative?
The other kind of client we could go to and say we can replace their $50,000 a year licensed software with a free option that's a perfect 1 to 1 drop-in replacement and no outage and they'll still refuse because they only want to use OEM software.
The past few years especially I've noticed a trend of more pushback due to the increase in big companies having cyber incidents. IT has been creeping in wanting far more control over OT networks.
(most 3rd party modules aren't authorised for installation on Edge)
