I'm looking at possibly setting up a wireless 3G router such as the D-Link DIR450 with an Omron CP1L PLC and having a remote connection from the office using Indusoft software. Has anyone ever done this? The PLC will be on a machine that may change location often, but should almost always be in 3G range. The connection will not be permanent. It will mostly be used for monitoring and troubleshooting during initial machine installation. There will be many of these machines located across the country, and I'm looking for a practical way to connect to each one.

I assume one hurdle will be the dynamic IP address of the 3G router. Can I get around that when the IP address in the PLC is static. I also wonder how I can figure out the IP address of the router at any given time. The Indusoft software will need to know this address to connect. I wonder if the IP address could be set up in a tag so the user could enter it at runtime instead of having to modify the program each time? There will be an operator at each machine location. I wonder if he will need a laptop to connect and find out the IP address.

I am considering wireless 3G because the machine manufacture wants to remain independant of his customers' LAN/WAN systems. Also, there is a video hardware/software system that the customer will also be using, and it also works on a 3G router. This system is separate from the PLC, but may share the same router.

The more I type here the more questions I think of, so I better stop for now!

Looking for suggestions or past experience info.

Thanks!

ECSI,

There are places within InduSoft Web Studio that you can reconfigure IP addresses from within the runtime.

Here are some ideas:

1. If you are trying to change the IP address of the PLC within the driver worksheet, you can use something like this: {IPTestAddress}:9600:1:2 in station field of the driver worksheet. Here the tag “IPTestAddress” would be a string representing the IP Address (note that it has to be in curly braces). I haven't tried this as I don't have your same model of PLC, but I was able to enter it into the field, and it allowed me to save the sheet.

2. If that router supports SNMP, there are tools within InduSoft to manage networks.

3. If you are trying to use InduSoft as a Web Thin Client you can dynamically change the configuration using the function, "SetWebConfig"

4. If this doesn't go too far beyond your security measures, you could place an ActiveX browser on the screen and open up the web configuration interface for the router.

Have you tried to contact InduSoft technical support?

Good luck in your project!

Skortier

Hi ECSI

I don't know about InduSoft but I think all you have to do is to configure your GPRS (3G) router with a free dyndns.org account (enter it in the dynamic ip section of the router). By doing this, each time the router's dynamic ip changes, it will inform the DNS servers on the internet of the change. So you will only have to *always* use say "freestaticip.dyndns.org" to point to your router and that DNS will automatically resolve to the actual ip address.

I am using this technique with ScadaMobile for several remote locations and it is working every time. The GPRS router on the side of the PLC actually gets a different IP each time it gets powered down but the "fixed" DNS you chose on your dyndns.org is always pointing to the right IP.

Therefore, the only thing I had to set in ScadaMobile is such a fixed DNS, and then forget about it.

Hope that helps,

Carbonat

Interesting stuff! I'll be looking into this more in the near future when I get a few other projects out of the way. Thanks for the info everyone!