Siemens Simatic S7 Driver for Tridium Niagara

The driver is designed to enable direct communication between Siemens Simatic S7 controllers and Tridium Niagara powered devices.

It provides an efficient solution for industrial systems monitoring, facilitates seamless integration of multiple protocols and allows convenient makeover of front-end software.

The driver implements Ethernet S7comm (S7 Communication) - Siemens proprietary protocol that runs between programmable logic controllers (PLCs). It is used for PLC programming, exchanging data between PLCs, accessing PLC data from SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) systems and diagnostic purposes.

The protocol is also used on top of other physical/network layers, like RS-485 with MPI (Multi-Point-Interface) or Profibus. However, Ethernet has several advantages against Profibus/Mpi:

• It’s faster, CP 1543-1 (for the newborn S71500) has a bandwidth of 1000 Mbps
• It’s simplier to troubleshoot, in 50% of cases a “ping” is good enough to solve your problems
• It’s cheaper, you don’t need special adapter to communicate