Siemens Win CC/Win AC on Windows 2000

B

Thread Starter

Brian Knuckles

I am looking at replacing a Genesis for DOS HMI with a Win CC HMI. Currently our system is using a Step 5 PLC. What I am looking at is using a Win CC HMI and converting the Step 5 program to a Step 7 and putting Win AC soft PLC on the HMI computer. This will all be running on a Windows 2000 system. Does anyone out there have any known problems with this or have any suggestions????
 
WinAC currently does not support Win 2000. When converting s5 to s7 is not fully compatible. Conversion gives information where he could not convert. But with some manual input full conversion is possible I believe. Why not conncet
s5 directly to WinCC. WinCC supports win 2000.
 
M

Maguire, Kevin

Hi Brian,

Question:

Will you be using WinAC RTX or WinAC Basis?

WinAC Basis will run on Win2000, but WinAC RTX does not yet.

WinAC RTX uses VenturCom's RTOS with WindowsNT. If you need determinism and NT-fault protection, WinAC RTX is the better solution. Your control program runs in RAM and NT tasks are processed outside of the control logic cycle (during a user-defined cycle). Control interupts will halt a processing NT task to service a control task. Your control program is independent of the
Windows task scheduler.

In addition, if you decide to use WinAC RTX, you should seriously consider the Siemens CP5613 Profibus card. This card has an onboard processor for comm. processing and a direct connection to WinAC RTX. There are several
benefits to this - mainly that control has continued realtime access to your I/O regardless of the state of WindowsNT (provided the computer is still powered) and the card offloads comm. processing from NT to the card so that NT is not using resources for the Profibus comm.

WinAC Basis runs on both NT and 2000. However, depending on your process, you may want to have a higher degree of determinism than the native MS OS
provides :)

We do have customers running machine applications using WinAC Basis on NT though.

To answer your original question - I am not aware of any known problems running either WinAC Basis on 2000 (it was released a couple of months ago)
or WinCC on Win2000.

However, my general recommendation is that you use an OS that is beyond the term of frequent service pack and hotfix releases that Win2000 is still in. NT is beyond this state and should provide a more stable platform.

I'm curious about your application, feel free to email me directly at "[email protected]", mailto:[email protected] if you have any other questions.

Good luck!

Kevin C. Maguire
Regional Business Development Manager
Siemens Industrial Software
847-839-3224
 
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