I do Siemens for a living and this week I am commissioning a filler on a bottling line that is all Rockwell, so bear with me. Built the screens from nothing in View Studio ME V12, CompactLogix 5380 underneath, PanelView Plus 7 on the door.
On the laptop it is perfect. Test Application runs, every numeric moves, the recipe screen writes down to the controller. Created the runtime, downloaded the mer to the terminal over the network, and on the terminal every numeric display shows //// and the buttons do nothing. Terminal pings the controller fine from its own network screen, and I rebuilt the mer and sent it again in case the transfer was bad.
Same tags in both cases, so I can't see how one works and the other doesn't. Is there a second place the path has to be set that a Siemens head like mine wouldn't think to look?
Open the terminal's diagnostics list and read the first few lines, they usually say the quiet part out loud. Does any of it name your shortcut?
If I remember right it's under Terminal Settings on the configuration screen.
Also, when you built the runtime, did View Studio warn you about anything before it made the mer, or did it go straight through?
Diagnostics list is full of the same line over and over, something about not being able to resolve an item and then the shortcut name, FILLER1. It repeats maybe twice a second.
The build did put a message up and I clicked past it, because the mer came out anyway and the build said it finished. Not sure whether that was the warning, I couldn't tell you what it said now.
Sounds like the tag types. In WinCC that error usually means the connection is there but the addresses behind it don't match what the controller has. Check the data types on the numerics, a DINT into a display expecting a string gives exactly this, and check the tag names for a trailing space where you copied them in.
Went through all of them, the numerics are all Analog and the tags are all DINT or REAL in the controller. No stray spaces, I checked in the tag browser rather than by eye.
I don't think it's the tags, though, because the same list works in Test Application on the laptop against the same controller. Whatever is wrong is on the terminal side, not in the tag database. No luck so far.
Sorry, basic one. What is a shortcut in FactoryTalk actually pointing at?
A path to a controller, and it has two of them, which is the bit that gets everybody once.
Communication Setup in View Studio has a Design (Local) tab and a Runtime (Target) tab. Design is what Test Application uses on the laptop. Runtime is what the terminal uses, it lives inside the mer, and it starts out empty. You set FILLER1 on Design and never touched Runtime, so the mer went out with a shortcut pointing nowhere. That's your unresolved item message.
Runtime (Target) tab, browse to the 5380 and land FILLER1 on it. There's a Copy from Design to Runtime button that does it in one go. Rebuild the runtime and send it again, the old mer won't pick it up. The two paths, there's a write up here: https://plctr.com/introduction-to-hmi-human-machine-interface-in-plc-systems/
That was it exactly. Runtime (Target) tab was empty, FILLER1 only existed on the Design side, and the terminal was looking for a controller that was not described anywhere in the file. Used Copy from Design to Runtime, created the runtime again, downloaded, and the numerics came up live before the screen had finished drawing.
Coming from WinCC there's no equivalent, the connection is the connection, so it never crossed my mind there were two of them. What I still don't follow is why the build only warns you instead of refusing, since it must know the runtime path is empty. Thanks hannah, hanab and northbay for sitting through a Siemens person learning Rockwell.
That build warning catches out more people than it saves.