Tag I/O Physical Addresses

After having inserted the Tag and inserted and configured the Driver you can now proceed with linking the Tag to the field device's physical address.  

Each Tag can in fact be configured with the physical address of the device to be connected during project runtime through its properties.  The Tag property used for doing this is called the ' I/O Physical Address' property.

 

 

Before inserting a dynamic link in a Tag you must insert and configure a Communication Driver in the project as described in the paragraph on  "Adding Communication Driver".  When doing this make sure that the driver is defined with the Channel and Station settings as well.

 

At this point proceed as follows:

 

  1. Select a previously inserted Tag in the project, or create a new one.

  2. Open the Tag's property settings window with F4 (right click -> edit-> Properties).

  3. Select the "I/O Physical Address" property and access its settings using the button on the right.

  4. Use the "Dynamic Settings" configuration window to set the physical field address for the desired Communication Driver.

 

 

Dynamic Tag link settings as physical field device address.

 

 

  1. The list of drivers installed in the project is displayed at the top of the "Dynamic Settings" window shown in separate Tabs.  Select the desired Driver to populate the "Dynamic Settings" window with its related fields to be set.

  2. For instance if you select the "Modbus Ethernet TCP-IP" Driver, the parameters that will show for defining their settings are typical of Modbus, such as "Function Code", Start Address" and "Link Type".

 

 

Dynamic Tag link settings window for the Modbus TCP-IP Driver.

 

 

  1. After having selected the connection parameters to the field device memory address, confirm with "OK".
    The Driver connection string will be shown In the Tag's "I/O Physical Address" property.  This connection string  summarizes the settings of the various parameters defined in the "Dynamic Settings" window:

 

 

A tag's property setting window with the "I/O Physical Address" field

 

The conditional variable accepts tag types: Boolean, SByte, Byte, Int16, UInt16, Int32 and UInt32

 

Note: The Driver connection string can be directly typed in the Tag's "I/O Physical Address" as long as great care is taken inserting the syntax correctly.

For example: ModbusTCP.Station=Station0|LinkType=1|FC=2|SA=354|File=0|BCast=False

 

After having configured the Tag's "I/O Physical Address" correctly, the Data Server will then be able to establish communication with field device during project runtime to read data from the PLC and update the Tag with it in real time.   

Data can be read or write, or write only according to the settings defined in the Tag's "I/O Physical Address" property.

 

Gateway Server

As from Movicon.NExT 3.1 version it will be possible to assign a Tag with a list of several dynamic addresses so that it can connect to several different drivers at the same time.

 

The dynamic links to be associated to the same variable must be links to different Drivers. It is not possible to insert two links of the same driver to the same variable.

 

The dynamic links associated to one single Tag can be of any type such as  Input, Output or Input/Output for example.  However, in cases where more than one dynamic Input/Output link has been associated to the one same tag, different devices might perform input operations at the same time.  If this happens, the last task performed will be the one that will value the tag.

 

It is not possible to import the same variable using the importer of two different drivers in order to have both links in the same Tag.  The second importer may overwrite the already existing variable and therefore the initial dynamic link may be replaced by the new one.