1. Foreword - banica/metering GitHub Wiki

What is this project about?

This project was made as an opportunity for both University (Politehnica University of Bucharest) and High School students to learn some new things about Automations Engineering that will help them out in their future carrers. The idea is simple: connect a PLC and see and control the output of the values created in it in Ignition SCADA. Just import a project inside of a PLC that has some values inside of it, and manage all of them inside of Ignition.

What is its final goal?

To use all the knowledge we gathered and connect PLCs to a classroom’s outlets and see the power used by each one of them to better manage electric utilities and costs. (The project will hopefully be scaled up, if everything goes well)

What worked and what didn’t work?

We first tried learning how to use basic Arduino sensors and it did not work out in our favor, the Arduino libraries we had to use were not first-party and lacked proper documentation so we ran in a lot of issues, also, for PLCs we have to use an OPC UA connection instead of Modbus, so it is better to learn on something more similar and get used to programs like Siemens TIA. We eventually came back to Arduino, but we had other issues with our PLC hardware setup, and could not fully test everything together. Also, doing this will help us get a good grasp on how the more industrialized process will look like and we will not encounter such issues

What is necessary for this project?

(DISCLAIMER: This project probably works with other hardware and software, but this is what we used and have done our testing on)

Hardware:

  1. Computer:
  • 200GB of free disk space (100GB for TIA and 30-40GB for Windows + Other programs like Ignition)
  • Windows 10 or 11 x64 (we used 11)
  • Ethernet card and port (we also recommend a Wifi or another ethernet port to always stay connected to the internet, the ethernet will be used to connect to the plc)
  • 12GB of RAM or more (8GB of RAM is the minimum spec for TIA, but since we will put the program inside of a VM you will also need to keep some for your host PC and 8 for the VM. If you don’t have more than 8GB of RAM you can run TIA off of your host PC, but we do not fully recommend this, TIA is a very hard program to get rid off without resetting your PC)
  • Processor: Intel® Core™ i5-8400H (2.5 up to 4.2 GHz) (again, TIA recommended requirement, you can find more about this here: https://support.industry.siemens.com/forum/ro/en/posts/tia-portal-simatic-manager-requirements/276405)
  1. Siemens PLC We used an S7-1200 PLC with the model name of: 6ES7 211-1BE40-0XB0
  • Ethernet cable to connect PLC and Computer (basic ethernet, nothing special)
  • Arduino Bitmi house + MAX 485 + RS 485 to USB adapter (used to need it, but you don’t currently since the goal has changed)
  • Waveshare RS232 to RS485
  1. Software:
  • Windows 11 Pro x64 + Windows 11 Pro x64 iso file for the VM (Windows 10 Pro also works, but I am going to list what we used)
  • TIA 19 + Licenses for it + Siemens Open Library (we believe everything should work on TIA 17 or greater, but we recommend using the latest version available to you for the best experience)
  • VMware Workstation Pro
  • Ignition SCADA + Ignition Designer

Our physical setup/layout:

physical setup