Hi all,
Based upon a question from a collegue I would like to open up a discussion around connectivity with Siemens S7 PLCs.
I know that Siemens offers multiple series of their S7 PLCs
The 1500 series for instance is able to act as an OPC-UA server, which makes it easy for Cumulocity to communicate with it.
Older series (e.g. 300 series) do not have the ability to communicate using OPC-UA. They only support the OSI-TCP Siemens proprietary protocol.
Cumulocity (currently) doesn’t support this protocol out of the box.
As a proof of concept I am looking at building a microservice based on the Snap7 project.
Do you have any other means to connect the older S7 series PLCs?
By the way, one of my customers has tried using a hardware gateway. The gateway was only capable of connecting a maximum of 3 PLCs due to the fast amount of tags in the PLCs.