Domore & Citect

[dengineeering]

We are doing more down under  - my second Dmore project and so far so good.  I have a 205 system with a H2_DM1E that is using Modbus RTU to a number of Variable Speed drives, and using Ethernet I/O to a Terminator RIO.  The previous system on this site used a DL250 based master PLC, and a Citect Scada communicating with the Koyonet driver via Ecom 100.   
I wish to reuse the Citect licence for this job, but I need some advice from learned folks as to the best implementation.

Citect is now part of the Schneider group, (an original Aussie product) and help from them is spotty at best.  It is a great Scada, but will languish now that Schneider have taken on Wonderware.

My first idea would be to set up the Domore as Modbus TCP server, and try and adapt the ModNet driver in Citect.  This may involve some mapping work in the Domore, but I have not researched this yet

The safer path would be to use install an OPC server on the Scada PC, and interface between the two.  We do not have an OPC (KEP??) yet, and I am still unsure how this will interface with the Domore.

I am happy to put in the hard yards to make this work, but would greatly appreciate any help to this end.

The DoMore is a mighty product, and I can feel some retrofits of existing DL installations coming on.

Denis    NSW Australia

[ADC Product Engineer]

You are probably going to have to use MODBUS or the Koyo net driver.  If I were to choose one, I would probably just go with MODBUS.

Do-more uses a specific section of memory for MODBUS and will require that you use that memory for the communications.  MI, MC, MIR, MHR registers are available.  The downside is that these are loosely typed registers similar to the DL205 so you will need to use casting to move values in and out of them from the strongly typed Do-more internal registers.

Hope this helps.  Cheers!

[dengineeering]

Thank you for chiming in here ADC support.
I have found that the KoyoNet Citect driver does indeed communicate with the DL Server in the DoMore - so at least I have a communications path.
BUT
1 Back to Octal addressing for the Scada and no "bit of word" casting for the Citect tags.
2 The DL server has only Integer definition for Vmem
3 Back to 2's complement etc for negative numbers
4 Limited memory range for Citect driver  - V1400 - V2777   

I will have a look at the Various modbus drivers and see if one of those will communicate with the Modbus Server.
If it did work, then at least it should provide some contiguous addressing to assist with the mapping in Do More.

[Controls Guy]

Yes and no.  You're going to SUBSCRIB/MAPIO/MEMCOPY/WHATEVER the DL values into the ranges you actually want to use, which have all that stuff, so if you can get Citect to write binary encoded numbers into the register, then the register just becomes a slot, encoding-agnostic.

But....that is yet one more reason to use Modbus (preferably TCP), because you avoid the encoding issue altogether and I'd bet the other issues would be at least as good as DL and possibly better.

[dengineeering]

Yep I agree re the agnostics
I guess I was looking for a tidy way to represent the Scada tags so that future technicians did not have to use a cross reference every time a change is made.
An academic argument with Modbus - at least the coils would follow on binary boundaries

On a side not, I often use the remote webserver in the Cmore screens as a distributed HMI.
This works well for more than just the  ADC products

However I have several Citect sites - and the clients prefer this in this instance - and they have already paid for the licence..