What is the best option of connecting 4 PLCs with a PC (with PC Access and WinCC)?

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Another question regarding connecting the PLCs (S7-200) with the PC. What is the best option of connecting those 4 PLCs with the PC (with PC Access and WinCC)? Because they are not really close to one another and the PC is going to be in another room, is the best way to do this with a PROFIBUS DP cable (then I need to ad a CP5611 card fot the PC and 4 EM277 communication modules) or ist there a way with a USB interface cable 6GK1571-0BA00-0AA0 (presume I need the EM277 modules one way or the other)?

This is a upgrade project and I just need to make the visualization, without the possibility to control/send data to PLC.

Thank you!

Edit: IF I use the solution with the USB cable, what is the furthest length that the cable is capable of? We would need min. 20m, maybe even 30m.

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Split from:Connecting 4 S7-200 with an SCADA with read-only display and reporting

Hello

first of all we need to know which WinCC HMI System you want to use? (WinCC flexible RT or WinCC Professional V1X Runtime or WinCC Advanced V1X Runtime or WinCC V7.X)

which Interfaces does the PLCs S7200 have in your case? (DP, PPI, Ethernet????)

If you have ethernet you can use an OPC Server to gather the Data from the PLCs and you can get access to it with the OPC Client in the WInCC System.

you can also use a Head PLC (S71200 for example) that collects the data from the S7200 and communicates with WInCC with the common channels.

Bye Murof