The industrial routers mbNET, mbNET.mini and the remote service portal mbConnect24 now support the discovery facilities of different PLC systems, also over the Internet.
The thinking behind these features is the ability of common programming systems to find existing controllers in the network without known or assigned IP address – as, for example, S7 controllers, which have the IP address 0.0.0.0 in the delivery status. Usually, this is limited to the local network.
These so-called discovery properties do not work through Layer3 communication, on which routed VPN connections are based. With the new SEARCHoverIP feature, the remote service portal now provides this work facilitation for remote access. Once the programmer is connected to an industrial router through the portal, the discovery requests are forwarded to the router and executed there. The response is returned to the programming software and the user can choose the controller. This means that the user has the same convenient options via remote maintenance as in the local network.
In addition to Siemens S7 controllers, PLCs of SchneiderElectric, Rockwell, Beckhoff and Pilz are also supported. The industrial routers mbNET and mbNET.mini can also find available controllers without a known IP address.