Hello,

This is my first time communicating with a 3rd party using an ASCII over TCP/IP with our existing S7-416 with an existing CP443-1 Advanced.  My gameplan is as follows:

1.) Setup communication via Netpro with an unspecified device.  I am choose connection type "TCP Conneciton", however I do see that "UDP Connection" may also be an option?

2.) The third party device is on the same network as the PLC and as such a route is unneeded.  The ip address and subnet of the third part device is x.x.x.142, and 255.255.255.0 respectively and has been verified to be correct by both ping and also accessing via webpage.

3.) The documentation for the 3rd party device specifies that I can choose between two options:

Port 22169 - "protocol does not use a handshake and adds a separator character to the default answer, the control character [EOT] (0x04) is used for this purpose.  This also enables communicaiton that works like PLC but requires a terminator character to recognize the end of the string - as with some camera systems, for example"

Port 22170 - "protocol is length-based, i.e. strings always have a fixed length and parameters passed are ignored if these also pass string lengths in the parameter set"

I am leaning to 22170 as I am wanting to assign the data to a data block and then transmit the content of the data block with a fixed length.

4.) For the mode on the connection I am leaving Send/Recv however I do see a passive write and am wondering if that is needed.

5.) After that is creating the data blocks and logic to convert the text and ASCII to hex which for the most part I am clear with.  I would then put the resulting hex in the datablock to send.  The response from the 3rd party device is a fixed length of 64 bytes if using port 22170, 65 bytes if using port 22169.

6.) To establish the connection on the PLC side and actually transmit the data I do need some help with what blocks to use.  I have read on the forum that I should use AG_SEND and AG_RECV and reference the connection setup in netpro and then tie the datablock information in step 5 to the SEND input of the AG_SEND block.  See below from where I am referencing that

https://support.industry.siemens.com/cs/document/17853532/how-do-you-program-the-communication-blocks-fc5-and-fc6-?dti=0&lc=en-WW

What I am humbling asking the forum for is if this all sounds correct and if you could shed a little extra light on the grey areas/questions I have from the steps above.  Thank you.

Dear 

I have similar application. I want to send ASCII data over TCP/IP with S7-400 to the printer.

Can you send me sample program ?

Reg.

HG