S7-1200 communication in Labview 2013 without NI OPC

[vaibhavsl]

Dear All

I want to connect Siemens S7-1200 PLC (Ethernet/Profinet) in Labview for IO's and data.

But I dont want to buy NI OPC as its licensing is costlier for multiple projects.

Please suggest me either any free alternative for NI OPC or any other programming way for the communication in labview itself.

I am also searching about c# dotnet code to communicate with PLC and use it in labview (dll or calling through VI) If this way is also possible please let me know.

[rolfk]

While there exists open source OPC libraries, none have native LabVIEW bindings, and that is where the real work lies.

But there might be another solution that does not involve installing a rather huge OPC environment. Snap7 is an open source project that implements directly the Siemens TCP/IP network, although last I checked it did not support the "compressed IO" settings in modern Siemens TIA projects. But it was easy enough to disable that setting in the project settings for the involved memory and IO blocks, so that Snap7 can access these items anyhow. The best part about Snap7 is that it does come with LabVIEW bindings even though I would have made them a little more LabVIEW friendly myself.

Another alternative is the SP7 Toolkit on the LabVIEW Toolkit page. It's not free but has reasonable licensing costs.