Videos

B&R Automation Studio: Troubleshoot Hardware Using Network Command Trace

Hi, I'm Otto Gottlieb. I'm an automation engineer at DMC. Today, I'd like to talk to you about troubleshooting hardware in B&R Automation Studio. 
This video will demonstrate how to load the network command trace in order to see the communication between the PLC and hardware.

In this example, we have lots of hardware, but I want to see the communication between the PLC and this piece of hardware, so I'm going to double click on it, and then I'm going to 

right click on “G Access 05” and I'm going to open the trace. This brings up this graphical screen. I will right click again, and this time I'll select Show Network Command Trace. 

On this blank screen, I can right click and select Load Data From Target. But, since I'm not connected to the target, last time I selected Save Data to File so that this time, I can 

now load data from the file. 

Now, I select the communication file that I wish to load and click Open. Now I wait for the data to load. Now that the data has loaded, we can see all the communication between the 

PLC and the hardware. You can see the requests from the PLC and the responses from the hardware.

What I like to do is organize by node. Also, in the very far left column, you see the index; the higher the number in the index, the more recent the communication. Scrolling through 

the trace, you can see all of the communication. You can even select individual line items to get more information about each individual command. Over on the right-hand side, you 

can see the time of the request versus the time of the response. 

I hope you have found this tutorial helpful, and I hope you continue using B&R Automation Studio.