Labview connection with a s7-300 plc via ethernet

[jan.saeck@dlr.de]

Hello everyone,

I have a big problem:

I want to communicate with a Siemens S7-300 plc via ethernet.

And I dont know how to do. 😉

Is this possible without any Profibus or Applicom card?

Are there any drivers or example-vis available?

I only have the pc with Labview, an ethernet switch and the plc s7-300.

Do I need the OPC-server or can I make a direct datasocket connection?

Thanks a lot for the help

Cheers

Jan

[Jochen]

Jan,

PLC communication is a standard use-case for LabVIEW applications. There are several options to do this. 
For your application OPC might be a good option you can use the DataSocket API to talk to an OPC server. For very fast communication a direct communication via Profibus is recommended. E. g. Comsoft provides an easy to use LabVIEW driver for their Profibus boards (DF Profi II).

If you plan to build a high channel count application and OPC you may want to consider LabVIEW DSC as an option as it has a much better perfromance than DataSocket and it provides a lot of valuable features as historical datalogging, alarm & event monitoring and logging, user managment and a lot of more features that are useful in industrial applications.

I hope this helps,

Jochen Klier
National Instruments Germany