Defining the peripheral addresses of the Applicom driver

The panel shown in the figure allows to configure a peripheral address for the Applicom driver.

The address is created with the aid of the single components (Equipment name combo box, Address text field). The peripheral address is finally visible in the text field Reference and contains the device name that was defined for a specific device. The driver determines all other important parameters for the access to the device via Applicom like channel, protocol, card and device number via this device name.

Figure: Definition of an Applicom peripheral address

• Equipment name
  Choose the device from the combo box. The communication takes place via this device. The peripheral devices Applicom establishes a connection to are created with the aid of the configuration panel (see Configuration of the Applicom driver).

Caution

If you configure an address, which contains a device that did not have an address when the driver started, the address does not work (the status of the device in the configuration panel for the Applicom driver remains "Starting" ). The addresses configured afterwards work first after a re-start of the driver (an appropriate message is displayed in the log viewer). Otherwise you can configure addresses online and they are directly available without a re-start of the driver. Note that you have to be located in the address space of spontaneous data when configuring spontaneous input data online (see also Access functions and polling).

• Address
  Define here the address that is assigned to the data point element at the peripheral device. As shown in the figure above the bit number 0 in the byte with the number 0 on a Siemens Simatic S7 is configured for the data point element "ExampleDP_AlertHdl1." The reference is composed of the configured device and the address. The address is configured in the panel protocol-dependent. You can find the specific addressing also in the Applicom help of the respective protocol (the addresses are represented in a table). For more information on protocol specific addresses see chapter Rules of the address transformation.

• Type of transformation
  Choose the transformation type from the combo box. The transformation type is the interpretation of the data that was read on the peripheral device. The transformation always has to match with the address (if e.g. 4 bytes are read from the PLC the type of the transformation has to be float or int32). For more information on the transformations see chapter Details on the Applicom driver.
   

• Subindex
  Using word oriented PLCs (e.g. Siemens S5) you can access bytes within a word with the Subindex functionality.

• Low level comparison
  This option can only be chosen if the direction was set to input or in/out (bidirectional peripheral communication). If it is selected data are sent only when there are changes. The comparison is based on raw data without any conversion. The low level comparison is a old/new comparison and is executed already with the data received from the periphery. (contrary to smoothing where the data is already assigned to data points). In a low level comparison the single bits of byte blocks are compared to old values and when a bit changes the value is let pass. A low level comparison is executed automatically when using the internal card polling.

• Direction
  Defines whether the values of a data point element are sent in the command direction (output), in the alert direction (input) or in both directions (In/Out).

CAUTION

Note that you cannot have two identical active outputs. If you try to configure two identical outputs, an error message is shown: WCCOANV     (2), 2007.07.04 15:22:14.697, PARAM,SEVERE,     47, Duplicate peripheral address for this output, DP: System1:dyn_struct_2.three:_address.._reference, MAN: (SYS: 1 Event -num 0 CONN: 1).
 

• Receive mode
  The receive mode for the input is spontaneous, polling or single query.
   

• Poll group
  Choose already existing poll groups. If there are no poll groups available you have to create them with the specific polling parameters in an own panel. The panel is opened by clicking on the Poll groups... button (see Poll groups for more information on poll groups and polling parameters).

Note

A change of the poll group or the first use of a poll group during runtime of the driver, requires a re-start of the driver!

Note

The Applicom poll list should be used at poll times < 1 second. Synchronization times are not supported when using the Applicom poll list. If a synchronization time is defined in a poll group the Applicom driver takes care of the polling function automatically.

With the config entry MaxInternPollTime (see also Possible config entries of the Applicom driver) you can define what else should be polled with card polling (Default is 10 seconds). With poll times < 5 seconds the synchronization time is ignored. For all elements over this time and having a defined synch. time, driver polling is used.

• Address active
  If the Address active check box is chosen the address is used by the driver (see Reference tables). An inactive address exists and the attributes can be set and queried but the driver does not use them. This means that no values can be sent to PLC or received from the PLC for this data point.