Tia Portal V13 Sp1 Update 43

Here at DMC, we spend a lot of time programming PLCs and HMIs. While we program systems of all types and flavors, I'm personally most experienced with Siemens (TIA Portal) and Rockwell (RSLogix5000/FactoryTalk View). There are a few new features included in TIA Portal V13 SP1 that I have found to be incredibly useful in the past few months and have allowed me to be even more efficient in my programming. I'm going to focus today on a series of updates that were added in SP1 that make it even simpler to take advantage of the nested data structures we can create in our Data Blocks - specifically, the ability to share UDTs between a PLC and HMI, link UDTs to Faceplates, multiplex arrays of UDTs, and create simple, powerful pop-ups.

Tia Portal V13 Sp1 Update 43

Download File: https://www.google.com/url?q=https%3A%2F%2Ftinourl.com%2F2u60gb&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AOvVaw0t2rkUoNhZ1jRKQltfuj5n

As an exercise, let's pretend we have a project with a large number of simple valves. Of course we like to save time, so we're going to develop a special FB to handle our valves: auto/manual control, alarms, etc. In addition to eliminating the amount of code to be written, this allows us the additional advantage of keeping our future valve logic updates to a single place. Our FB has a few inputs including the feeback signals for open/close, an in-out for our 'valve' data type, and an output for the open/close command.

Inside the faceplate editor, I could create new properties for the fault status, the valve state, and the valve name, then tie each to the appropriate item/animation. However, this would require linking each of these properties back to the appropriate tag inside of my data structure. With a lot of valves, this could take a lot of work. This is where one of the new TIA Portal V13 SP1 updates will come in handy: the ability to use PLC UDTs (PLC data types) in the HMI.

The second task we set out to accomplish was to create a pop-up that can show more detailed information for any given valve. In this case, we want to create our pop-up so that it is capable of being opened to display any one valve at a time. To do this, we will need to set up a 'multiplexing' tag to look at different valve instances in our array of udtValve. If you've tried this before, you may have run into issues. Luckily, there have been a few updates in V13 SP1!