Ethernet\IP

[andrew101]

i just recently upgraded to Geoscada 2020 and am wanting to utilize the Ethernet/IP drivers. I currently have about 7,000 OPC-Advanced points that I will be wanting to convert to Ethernet/IP.  What is the easiest way to achieve this?

[BevanWeiss]

There's unfortunately not simple way to do this.

You will need to reference your OPC server configuration as to what PLC tag names are used for each OPC variable.

If you're using something like Kepware / Matrikon you may indeed be using passthrough tagging, in which case your tagnames may already be within GeoSCADA.

You'll likely need to use something like the Bulk Edit Tool, you can then get a spreadsheet with the names of your new Ethernet/IP Points, and what the PLC tagname for each should be.

Then you just replace your existing templates with new templates containing Ethernet/IP Points named identically for every Advanced OPC point.  This should keep the history, and as much of the point configuration as matches between the Advanced OPC <-> Ethernet/IP.

For OPC Points that are not in templates, then you'll need to individually convert these across to Ethernet/IP Points.. you may want to take that opportunity to templatise them..

Once you've converted a batch of OPC -> Ethernet/IP (perhaps a site at a time) then you'd run the Batch Edit tool to push in the correct PLC tagnames for the Ethernet/IP points.

[geoffpatton]

Be aware that the Ethernet/IP driver only supports Tag names so if you have any PLCs that use the addressing like N16:11/15 you won't be able to convert over.

This killed my plans to convert a customers AB sites to the Ethernet/IP driver. Since we could not eliminate the OPC server they decided not to spend the time to do any of it. Any new sites that can use the Ethernet/IP driver will.

[BevanWeiss]

That's a bit of a trap with the CIP stuff in general.  N16:11/16 in such a PLC is actually not a CIP identifier.

That's a DF1 identifier.. the way that it ends up being 'usable' via CIP is that CIP allows for tunnelling of other data.. and hence this DF1 can be encapsulated within a CIP message.  It's called PCCC.

It would be nice if GeoSCADA Expert supported PCCC however, for the reason that you've mentioned Geoff, it does strike out quite a lot of legacy Rockwell controllers (MicroLogix 1x00, SLC, PLCx families).

It might be worth adding such a feature request in the Ideas forum..