Requirements and installation

Requirements

For information on the supported platforms of the S7 driver see Supported Platforms of the most important Drivers.

Notes and Restrictions

Following notes and restrictions must be considered when using the S7 driver:

  • For receiving unsolicited data from the PLC with the S7 driver you need the TSPP extension on the PLC.
  • You can connect to a maximum of 256 PLCs with one S7 driver. If you require more connections, an additional driver must be started.
  • The use of TSPP is only possible for S7 and over Industrial Ethernet. That means that it is not supported for MPI connections.
  • For the periphery device types S7-1200 and S7-1500 the config entries "[s7] ReadPLCTime" and "[s7]_AutoTimeSyncFactor" are not supported.

    For these devices the functions can only be used via the S7Plus driver.

  • The engineering/configuration of the driver must take place on the local machine (a configuration from the distributed system is not supported).

Installation

A normal installation of WinCC OA is sufficient for using the S7 driver. See chapter Installation for more information on installing WinCC OA.

Engineering von Siemens S7-1200 / S7-1500 PLCs

S7-1200

PLC / Firmware Engineering system
S7-1200 CPU-Firmware v2.0 and higher Step7 V10.5 and higher
S7-1200 CPU-Firmware v3.0 and higher Step7 V11 SP2 and higher
S7-1200 CPU-Firmware v4.1 and higher Step7 V13 SP1 and higher
S7-1200 CPU-Firmware v4.2 and higher Step7 V14 and higher

S7-1500

PLC / Firmware Engineering system
S7-1500 CPU-Firmware v1.0 through 1.8 Step7 V13 SP1 update 4 and higher
S7-1500 CPU-Firmware v2.0 Step7 V14 and higher

Connection establishment with a S7-1500/S7-1200 PLC

The S7-1500 and S7-1200 require the TIA portal as the engineering tool. To establish a connection between WinCC OA and S7-1500 or S7-1200, the following configuration is required:

  • For data blocks that are addressed by WinCC OA the "Optimized block access" option must be disabled.
  • PUT/GET Communication must be enabled. The "Permit access with PUT/GET communication from remote partner (PLC, HMI, OPC ...)" check box can be found in the "Device configuration > General > Protection > Connection mechanism" section of the CPU properties.

If the check box "Permit access with PUT/GET communication from remote partner (PLC, HMI, OPC ...)" is not displayed, the web server must be enabled. By default it is disabled.