September 4, 2012 - Progea released SINAUT ST1 driver for Movicon 11, designed for control systems based on Simatic S5 and S7 with Sinaut ST1 protocol. This low level SINAUT ST1 protocol, originally created for Siemens S5 PLC telecontrol, is also supported by the later S7 version. In particular, this driver supports the ST1 protocol without address extension and connections with RTUs whether through dialup networks or dedicated lines are transparent to driver. This driver permits cyclic interrogation of stations associated to the various PLCs and to send commands with or without data. The cyclic data reading of each individual PLC allows a greater number of messages to be exchanged.
To ensure maximum flexibility of use, the Movicon driver permits users to define existing data structures (those read cyclically), command code and any eventual data structures sent with these commands in each PLC. Basically, the user must define one unique input task for each station plus output tasks for sending commands. A ‘Data Template’ must be associated to each input task, being a data structure which represents the PLC’s data, along with a structure variable type. The structure prototype of the Movicon variable associated to the task must correspond, field by field, to the “Data Template” defined in the driver. Input tasks are executed cyclically, independently from the “in use” status of the associated variables.
The driver also provides a dialog window for defining commands to be associated to output tasks. There is also an option to associate output tasks with “Data Templates” which define the structure of data to be transmitted. The possibility offered by the driver to define data structures and command code to be sent permits the user to integrate them in the same application containing differently configured PLCs while remaining compatible with pre-existing projects.
