EPICS & Siemens PLC Tutorial

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    EPICS testS7 IOC Setup Tutorial

    Intro

    The ESTHER Slow Controller system controls the gas injection into the combustion chamber of the shock tube. This system uses the EPICS framework to communicate with a Siemens SIMANTIC S7-1200 PLC using the Open Source EPICS Device Support Library s7nodave. A Control System Studio graphic user interface client is used to visualize and control the whole experiment by connection with the EPICS IOC server.

    This tutorial is presented as a reference to setup a server computer running an EPICS server that connects to the S7 PLC. An example EPICS IOC "testS7" application and accompanying CSS interface are provided. This example application allows the control and observation of all digital IO and analog inputs of the connected S7-1200 PLC.

    System Setup

    Hardware Platform

    The requirements to setup this testS7 application are:

    1. A computer running a 32-bit Operating System (a 32-bit operating system is required to implement polling groups using the s7nodave device support library in EPICS). Two ethernet cards (One connected to the local network without internet access where the PLC is present).
    2. A Siemens SIMANTIC S7-1200 PLC powered with 24 VDC.
    3. A client computer running the CSS interface.

     

    The setup used for this tutorial was:

    1. A Supervisor EPICS server:
      1. Virtual Machine running Debian GNU/Linux 7.7.0 32-bits
      2. Linux Kernel 3.2.0-4-486
      3. Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-3770 CPU @ 3.40GHz
      4. 512 MB RAM
      5. Two Bridged Intel Corporation 82540EM Gigabit Ethernet Controllers
        1. eth0 connected to IPFN network with IP 10.136.237.21 subnet 255.255.0.0 (with internet access)
        2. eth1 directly connected to the S7-1200 PLC with IP 192.168.0.70 subvnet 255.255.255.0 (without internet access)
    2. ​A Siemens SIMANTIC S7-1200 PLC powered at 24 VDC using an external power supply and connected to the eth1 of the Supervisor EPICS Server with IP 192.168.0.1 subnet 255.255.255.0.
    3. A client computer running CSS on the IPFN network 10.136.xxx.xxx subnet 255.255.0.0.
    4.  

     

     

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