Soft PLC serves hardware-free Profinet

New STRATON driver eliminates Profibus hardware costs

An IEC 61131-3 standard Soft PLC now supports the Profinet standard for real time communications over Ethernet hardware. An advantage of Profinet is that it uses standard CAT5 cables and connectors, compared to the expensive connectors and termination required by Profibus. Using the Soft PLC STRATON from COPA-DATA, control engineers can reduce system costs further by replacing dedicated fieldbus hardware with a “soft” Profinet server, without any loss of performance.

Following the dramatic announcement of the German association of automotive manufacturers (AIDA) that Profinet would be their new standard for manufacturing, COPA-DATA were called upon by for its numerous automotive customers to support Profinet. For example, BMW who use the company’s zenOn SCADA/HMI software exclusively for all areas of plant worldwide now require a gateway to collect data from their plant.

The Soft PLC can of course be programmed to control in its own right, however there are other advantages of soft logic. STRATON is integrated off-the-shelf into zenOn SCADA software, providing a ready made solution to serve project data to the SCADA system. This Profinet gateway functionality is provided in the forthcoming release of zenOn 6.21, for all Windows and Windows CE platforms.

Profinet IO RT communication was first demonstrated in operation at the SPS/IPC/DRIVES fair in Nuremberg at the end of last year. A 200m long Ethernet link was set up between a COPA-DATA hosted the STRATON soft PLC acting as a Profinet controller (master) and a WAGO hosted PROFINET I/O device (slave). The STRATON runtime controlled the WAGO I/O modules successfully, resulting in a display of blinking digital outputs controlled by the remote STRATON PLC.

Profinet IO RT is the factory automation component of Profinet that provides classic fieldbus level operation and replaces Profibus. In the new terminology, the new driver operates as a Profinet IO controller (master). Using a powerful tool within STRATON, the user can browse the Profinet network and parameterize the devices using GSDML (Generic Station Description Markup Language) files.

COPA-DATA is the most innovative leader in the HMI/SCADA software market. They have become global trailblazers due to their know-how and experience gained from the installation of more than 50,000 systems in the automotive and machine construction industries, and energy and production plants worldwide. COPA-DATA has been developing HMI/SCADA technology at it’s headquarters in Salzburg, Austria since the mid- 80s. With the program suite zenOn® the company released the first graphical visualization system that ran fully under Windows. The system’s universality from Windows CE up to XP has facilitated full compatibility from the terminal up to the control room, and a sophisticated distributed network technology.

The new generation 6 of zenOn, with automatic engineering and highly efficient reusability of existing project parts reduces engineering time considerably. In addition, COPA-DATA’s STRATON® offers an extremely flexible IEC-61131-3 development environment for embedded systems and soft logic. Together, zenOn and STRATON yield a completely integrated solution. Today’s COPA-DATA distribution network has subsidiaries in Germany, Italy, France and Middle East and partners all over the world. COPA-DATA presently employs more than 100 staff, and has an impressive client reference list including companies such as Festo, BMW and Audi.

COPA-DATA GmbH
Karolingerstrasse 7b
5020 Salzburg / Austria
http://www.copadata.com

This release was published on openPR.