I’m having trouble connecting to or downloading to the AXCF2152 PLC. I’m wondering if PLCNext Engineer is capable of connecting to a remote PLC.
For example, I’m working from home over a VPN, and the PLC is located in one of our mills. I connect to our programming server, which is hosted on AWS, using PLCNext Engineer software version 2024.6.0.
I can ping the PLC and access its web page, but I cannot discover the PLC in the Online Controllers section or in the Cockpit section. However, when I’m physically at the mill and directly connected to the same switch and subnet with my laptop (with PLCNext Engineer installed), I can connect to the PLC using the same project.
Any help would be appreciated.
Hi letone,
connecting to the PLC and discovering it via Online scan are two different things. The online scan uses DCP to find Profinet devices and it might be that DCP packets are blocked by the network infrastructure between the PLC and your PC.
Does the Online Log in PLCnext Engineer contain an error message?
Best regards
DivisionByZero
it might be that DCP packets are blocked by the network infrastructure between the PLC and your PC.If the devices are separated by a router, then this is not only a possibility, it’s guaranteed. DCP is a layer 2 protocol, so it cannot traverse layer 3 devices like routers.
If the IP address that is assigned to the device in PLCnext Engineer can be pinged from the development machine, then it should be possible to go online to the PLC from PLCnext Engineer, and to send a project to the device, etc. This access to the PLC can also be checked by logging in to the PLC from the command-line of the development machine using ssh (e.g. ssh admin@192.168.1.10)
Thank you for the answer. I finally was able to connect to the PLC from the remote engineering station.
The issue was that the online controller had firmware revision 04/2024.0.6, while my PLCnext Engineer project had firmware revision 00/2024.6.0.
When using the Scan Network feature, PLCnext Engineer will find the controller even if the revision isn’t the same and will issue a warning. I could not use this feature since it would need to traverse multiple routers.
When using the Connect to Controller feature from Cockpit, if the revision is not exactly the same, it will not connect and will issue the MSG_ONL0047 error.
Changing the revision in PLCnext Engineer to match the physical controller was the solution to connect to the controller from Cockpit.
Thanks,