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8/3/2015 6:56 PM | |
Posts: 5225 Rating: (1185) |
(TONE: informal, informative, subjective, positive) Hi everyone. There are plenty of negative feedback when it comes to TIA Portal. I hope to share some positives. We updated our systems from TIA Portal (Step7 & WinCC) V13 SP0 Update 6 (V13.0.6) to TIA Portal V13 SP1 Update 4 (V13.1.4). The uninstall and (especially) the installation was a pain. Mostly because of the lack of accurate progress feedback. At some point you have to check if the LOG file is growing in size before knowing that "2 minutes" left is not a "software freeze".. just inaccurate prediction. It is strange that the installation procedure is taking such little CPU and memory resources. Maybe in future the installation will take more resources and get the job done more quickly! We followed the steps.. * Remove license from PC (Move license to license disk) * Complete uninstall of TIA V13 SP0 [LINK] * Install the TIA V13 SP1 trial software [LINK] * Install Update 4 [LINK] After the installation, I tested the software by opening a current project (CPU1214 with KTP700). Surprisingly the software needed to update the V13 file to a V13.1 format. The TIA Portal software was much smoother on handling the project when comparing V13.0.6 with V13.1.4. The lag times were greatly reduced and the system is more responsive. TIA V13.1.4 does take more PC resources than before. The CPU is more busy and maybe 10% more memory is used. Even on one of our lesser specs PCs, this is not a problem for our use. Working with multi instances of TIA is also more stable and responsive. Previously if you are linked to a PLC and the PC goes into sleep mode, the TIA session crashed when waking the PC from sleep. That meant that you had to upload changes you made earlier on from the PLC. In extreme cases the CPU was unresponsive too - which meant a power cycle. The good news is that this issue has been resolved (..still testing some more). I could not even get the parallel installation of TIA V11.2.6 to freeze as it did before. It seems as though the communication module has been made better. Now the simulator.. we have tested only small programs, but seems to work well. It is important to note that you have to tell the simulator which PLC type (S7-1200 in our case) is being simulated and then "download" from Step7 to the Simulator. We have noticed that the 1st thread on the PC's CPU is occupied at 100%. THAT is not too much of a good idea - it would have been better to occupy the last thread, as this is normally not used regularly by traditional applications. I would warn you to keep this in mind when running several applications on the PC. The next target would be to test the abilities of Motion Control V5 on the S7-1200 FW4.1 PLCs. I am sure there are also other functionality treasures to discover. In summary - I am of the opinion that TIA Portal V13.1.4 is worthy to have been the major version V14.0. It is good however that we could update to V13.1.4 without buying it. The results of the TIA Portal design team can be clearly seen; a good step forward. Maybe one day we will see the software develop to what the product promoters promise in their advertisements. Greetings. w |
Last edited by: William_B at: 8/3/2015 8:37:45 PMadd some web links Last edited by: William_B at: 8/4/2015 7:21:34 AMadd small detail |
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