Hey you guys!

As a part of my masterthesis I need to setup some sort of communication between a PC and a PLC.
The PLC needs te be able to read and write data from and to a database which is located on the PC.

I've been searching on the internet the last few hours and I've found some information but it's still not very clear to me.

A common way of doing this is using OPC, right?
Are there any other ways of doing it?
I've read about Modbus, but I think that the PLC I'm using doesn't support this.
Also writing your own dll but this doesn't sound very attractive since the project is going to be implemented in industrial applications so it needs to be without any errors.

I've read something called DAVE for Siemens, but I can't find any decent information on the fella!

Also, programming: I've read it's done in C++, are there other options because this is one I haven't tried once?

I hope someone out here can help me with these questions, I'd appreciate it!

Kind regards,
Kevin

 

Hello,

PeakHMI might be a good fit.

Good luck,

Mark
http://www.peakhmi.com/

 

Hi Kevin,

There are few ways of establishing communication between devices in general. You should try to evaluate which communication is sufficient for your project.

You can try:

serial communication,
some proprietary communication protocols like DH+,
ethernet based communication,
OPC server or else.

Some times it may be sufficient to send and receive ASCII characters over serial bidirectional communication.
You can try third party OPC servers like Kepware.

Please check:
http://www.kepware.com/Products/products_linkmaster.asp
I hope this helps,

Igor

 

If this was a "real world" question, then you could simply go out and buy a fully working solution. OPC is the most common way of solving this problem and there are several off-the-shelf solutions for doing exactly what you want.

http://www.matrikonopc.com/opc-drivers/opc-generic-data-access/base-driver-details.aspx
http://www.opclogger.com/
http://www.opcdatahub.com/

But because this is for a "Master Thesis" you need to be more specific about what it is you want to do. Are you writing software?, developing an HMI? Do you need to talk to a specific database like MySQL or SQLServer? Have you already selected which type of PLC you will use etc ? If your aim is to write an OPC to Database connection from scratch you need something like http://industrial.softing.com/en/pr...-ua-windows-c-server-development-toolkit.html (remove spaces from the link)

 

> The PLC needs te be able to read and write data from and to a database which
> is located on the PC.

You will need a piece of software running on the PC that
- communicates with your PLC
- handles database access

Our http://pvbrowser.org may thus be interesting for you. It already supports several PLC protocols and uses the database classes from the Qt library.
You can do programming in C/C++ or Lua.

The software is open source and platform independent.