John Michael Frullo

05/22/2019

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Have you ever been trying to change the color properties (ex. background color) of an object in WinCC 7, and it just won’t budge? Are you already familiar with the global color scheme property and constantly find yourself turning it off? Are yo...

Nick Leisle

05/09/2019

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Welcome back to “Getting Started with WinCC OA”! If you aren’t familiar with the series’ previous topics, it’s recommended that you read the respective installments before proceeding: Part 1: Creating and Opening a...

Nick Leisle

04/22/2019

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“OA is a beast of a program.” One of my fellow DMC engineers made this remark when I began learning how to program using SIMATIC WinCC Open Architecture (OA for short). Indeed, for someone just getting started with OA, the SCADA software ...

Lillian Walker

02/21/2019

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I was recently working on a project with a tricky trending feature: display a trend over the course of a batch while the batch is running. No matter how long the batch had been running, we wanted to show the process value for the length of the trend....

Furqan Ayub

10/03/2018

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WinCC Advanced provides a way to monitor the heartbeat of the HMI through an area pointer called coordination word. PLC can monitor this life bit and find out when the HMI gets disconnected. This blog shows you how to monitor the HMI life bit on a...

Eric Baggen

04/19/2018

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I recently developed an HMI using WinCC 7.4 for an automation project. Building it from the ground up afforded me the opportunity to deviate from WinCC’s default skeuomorphic controls and instead experiment with more modern, flatter UI ele...

Elizabeth Hill Reed

04/18/2018

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For a recent project, I created a combo box object that is set using a VBScript. The following blog details some advantages of using a VBScript and four steps to loading a combo box using a VBScript in WinCC Pro. Advantages of VBScript The m...

Nikhil Holay

10/11/2017

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This blog is an instruction guide to installing the necessary Comfort Panel HMI software for interfacing with a Siemens RFID card reader. Additionally, the guide will demonstrate the necessary setup elements in the PLC project, as well as instru...

Jason Mayes

07/21/2017

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One of the great, and underused, features in TIA Portal is the Network Topology tab of "Devices and Networks." It can enable you to accomplish a number of advanced tasks while simultaneously providing more in-depth network diagnostics. Toda...

Nikhil Holay

04/14/2017

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ProTool is an HMI software package from Siemens. Most people (myself included) are most familiar with WinCC Flexible and Portal as the two primary Siemens HMI software packages. ProTool is the predecessor to WinCC Flex, and was phased out in 2004. So...