Proficy HMI SCADA - CIMPLICITY 8.0 + Omron TCP

[PdL]

Hi all, Recently we waved off Citect and switched to Proficy HMI SCADA - Cimplicity. While already 3 project license keys have landed on my desk, I have bearly finished the beginnners training and plugged in my developers key. We will be using the Omron TCP/IP native driver which according to the driver documentation uses proprietary FINS commands over UDP. I have good knowledge about the Omron FINS network setup and structure. I have been studying the somwehat fragmented help on the driver and sniffed through the GE Fanuc e-Forum and while still in the trial&error process I thought I could open a topic here aside to see if anyone can tell me things I don't have to figure out myself. For now I can't seem to connect to my test CPU, did all the global parameters setup and added correct entries in windows services and hosts file but the test tool gives me a socket connection failure. I will have to get back with more details on this but any contribution is welcome!

[PdL]

Well the Omron TCP driver (actually UDP) seems to be really old and doesn't support the newer CPU types and memory areas. I ended up using Kepware Omron FINS Ethernet driver which I had running in no time and does W area etc. A few extra bucks for the Kepware license but it feels a lot more confident using the OPC route than the native Cimplicity driver. Plus importing tags into Cimplicity goes really nice, it builds exactly the same tree structure type in Cimplicity point editor as you have in Kepware. Now I am trying to build a page template with buttons that have animated visibility. I have a good example using page variables but I know I can't use page variables in linked object so I created virtual points to replace the page variables. Can't seem to get it to work yet though but have to play some more... perhaps I'll open a second topic on that.

[lostcontrol]

Hi PDL, How are you getting on with this project? We did a iFIX with Kepware & Omron this time last year. I am not sure of the main difference's between iFIX & cimplicity, I do know that iFIX is VB based, so you can pretty much do whatever you want, if you have a good grasp of VB.... if not, is a good place to start. One thing that iFIX does have, and always has, is Tag Groups, which are useful for doing popup type substitutions etc. I have seen different installs where Tag Groups were not used, and just done with VB as well. I am not sure of the best way, iFIX seem to recommend the Tag Group option, but does create more maintenance, especially if there is many groups to be done. Every group has its own file... there must be a way to do this in bulk, but have not worked it out yet...

[lchamarthi]

Hi PDL, Can you please share me any examples you made while learning CIMPLICITY Thanks Edited December 17, 2013 by lchamarthi