I need to connect Crystal Reports to a Modicon PLC system. Crystal generally uses an ODBC driver to access data from databases, but has anyone found a way to extract data from a PLC network ?

 

There are quite a few different ways to extract data from your PLCs. The method all depends upon your knowledge and available skills within your company.

1. Least expensive, but requires the most broad skill set. - Purchase a communcations activeX or OPC compliant server and create your own custom interface to collect the data from the PLCs and store it in a database format that you can access from CrystalReports.

2. Purchase a software package that specializes in collecting data from a PLC and storing it in a database. Rockwell Software - RSSQL (very good product, but probably over kill for simple application), OSI - PI historian (great for collecting mass amounts of data & storing in compressed format. Stores data in proprietary database, but they include ODBC drivers), Wonderware - InSQL similar to PI, but is built around MS SQL Server product. The data is also stored in compressed proprietary format. And I am sure that there are many more options to chose from.

3. If you allready have some HMI licenses in your plant you may be able to do the data collection through the HMI as long as the volume is reasonable. RSView32 is able to create a historical trend connection to any ODBC compliant database. Wonderware is able to also, but depending on what database you want to store the iformation in you may need to implement some scripting.

Basically you will need to collect the data based on time, data change, exceeding a value or outside a range and a discrete value being tru/false. Store the data in a database and then Crystal Reports should query that data.

Hope this helps. If you want specific info you can reach me at [email protected]

Darren Ash

 

We use Visual Basic to communicate (read, write over Modbus+) thru a SA-85 driver module (driver module written by us in VB) and it pipes the data to an Access database. Crystal reports is used to format and report the data. An affordable and reliable solution.

 

Here try this.

http://www.matrikon.com/drivers/Details.asp?NameListID=199

Matrikon makes a ODBC driver that allows you to read/write to an OPC server. This sounds strange, so I don't know how well it will work.

 

Siemens has a product that is much less cumbersome and less expensive than all the below mentioned products. It too is ODBC compliant and will store data to MS SQL 2000 as well as act as an OPC server to any client on the market. The Modicon driver is included; therefore connection to the PLC is quite simple. The product is called ProTool/Pro. Because it is an OPC server and this is included there is no need to spend additional money for a third party server.

Ron Powers

 

You just need MovTracer. Have a look at:
http://www.progea.com/english/products/movtracer/movtracer.htm
Is a simple tool to communicate with any PLC (Schneider, Siemens, Rockwell, Mitsubishi and many others) and record your dato into an open DB. You can also define your .RPT file into any data logger.
Hoping you will find this useful.