WinCC7.0 and S7-1200

Hi guys,

I have some trouble to establish connection between WinCC 7.0 and S7-1214 via TCP/IP.
Using TIA, I set the IP address of the S7-1214 (IP=161.53.71.2, Subnet=255.255.255.0) and communication TIA-controller is working fine. Also using command window on my PC (IP=161.53.71.10, Subnet=255.255.255.0) I can successfully ping this IP address (PLC).

But I have trouble to establish communication between WinCC7.0 and controller. For the clarity of the following description please find attached figure Fig1 which consist of the screenshots of the applied WinCC settings.
In the WinnCC7.0 Tag Management I added new channel Simatic S7 Protocol Suite under which I found TCP/IP option, Fig.1.a). Under the System Parameters of the TCP/IP channel for the logical device named I pick the name of the computer TCP/IP card, Fig.1.b). I added new TCP/IP channel (1200) in which settings I set IP address of the S7-1214, Fig1.c). In this forum I found that for the slot number I should use 1 and for the rack 0 (also tried with 0 and 0). Also found that data exchange DB in the PLC should be non symbolic. So, In the PLC I defined non-symbolic DB3 and tried to read DBW12 from PLC, Fig1.d). Unfortunately without any success. Under the Channel Diagnosis found that this channel is not working (disconnected).

I also tried to check box Send/receive raw data block under the settings of the TCP/IP channel, Fig.1.b). In this case I don’t know which Connection resource I should use? I used 10 but without any success.

Did anyone tried to connect S7-1200 to WinCC7 (or 6)? Is it possible? Some people are saying that for now only HMI panels are supported! Can someone can confirm this?

Would appreciate if someone has any advice or information to share. There is not much settings to change and already I tried most of them so I don’t know what to do.

At the end I will give just few remarks. For the same project before I was using 224XP which was communicating with WinCC7 via GPRS (MD720), it was working spotless. Because of some infrastructure change I’m forced to switch GPRS with Ethernet. From the Siemens I got the suggestion that new S7-1200 would be the best solution (compromise). But how the things are started, more and more I’m convinced that this is maybe a big mistake. New environment is nice to work with, but for now communications (Modbus and TCP/IP) are giving me a lot of trouble.

Regards

Alen

Thanks for remark.

Yes, probably you got the point. It was silly to try without it.

I’m reading some posts about OPC&1200 and people are using Simatic Net OPC. Can I use some other OPC, like Kepware?