forum.rcware.eu Forum: MiniPLC (IPLC200/IPLC300) (english)

Jan Vidim on "MiniPLC limitations"

Jan Vidim — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 15:35:49 +0000

Every technical device has limited performance. For the MiniPLC, the original "soft" limitation, or rather reccomendation, was maximum 120 HW data points, which gives about 3 MCIO modules plus some binary input modules to reach the required I/O mix. In this configuration, and with application software typical for the normal HVAC plants, there is absolutely no problem with memory capacity, I/O bus response, web server response, computation cycle and other parameters.

Our customers discovered soon that there is some unleashed power in the Mini, and started to challenge the limits. When increasing the amount of I/Os (and corresponding function blocks in the IDE which serve them) it must be considered that the web server response is slower, and the refresh time in the clients (such as IDE, OPC server, and SCADA) increases, but everything keeps running.

However, one of the unsurpassable limits is the amount of communication channels:
- there may be maximum 3 channels of the same type, and
- the total amount must be less or equal 5.

So, if we have a COM port with I/O modules, a SMS modem, and three Native SoftPLC channels to read the link from other process stations, this is exactly the limit.

Another issue:
- the total number of connections the MiniPLC is able to keep is 10.

This includes those max. 5 channels plus incoming connection from the clients like Vision, IDE, touchscreen, external web panel, Native channels from other PLCs (!) etc.

In case you face a MiniPLC not communicating on some of the channels, even if tests in the IDE are OK, please check the amount and types of the communication channels. (The problem may be somewhere else, too, see also http://forum.rcware.eu/topic/57)

Those limitations do not apply for the Windows platform („Full“).

Jan Vidim on "Problems with alarm e-mails"

Jan Vidim — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 13:55:03 +0000

There have been requests lately asking for help with MiniPLC (same situation is with touchscreen process stations, anyway) alarm e-mail configuration. E-mailing did not work, although during tests in the office everything was OK.

The problem was with SMTP server: the MiniPLC is connected to the Internet via a provider who is able to allow access to particular SMTP servers only to prevent spamming from within the network. Contact your ISP or network admin to get the necessary data:
- name or IP address of the SMTP server
- user name (if this is not an anonymous server - today, nearly all servers request authentification)
- password for this user name
- port which the server listens on
- is the Secure Socket Layer (SSL) protocol used?
Enter those data in the Project alarms configuration menu of the Touchscreen Editor.

NB.: even RcWare Vision can send e-mails, you only have to use scripting. We will be pleased to send you a sample project, just drop a mail to support@domat.cz. What is it good for? For example, automatic energy readouts sent to the utility provider at the beginning of each month...

Jan Vidim on "AEW21.1 and MiniPLC"

Jan Vidim — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 09:16:20 +0000

When integrating the M-Bus AEW21.1 converters to MiniPLC beware of the timeout settings in the comm parameters of each datapoint (Special params - Telegram timeout): if there are communication problems, increase this value from default 400 up to 2000 ms.