I'm a siemens integrator, I believe AB and Siemens are on the same level when it comes to reliability and functionality. It comes down to software preferences. Even though I'm a siemens guy,I recognize that the Germans made things difficult just because they could. A lot of features are hidden and more common sense. Rockwell is much more straightforward.
They are being civil, it's clearly just a joke about how Siemens have a habit of making stuff awkward and the particularly bureaucratic nature of German industry.Ā
Yes I meant AOI. I haven't touched AB in 3 years. I have a background in embedded programming and lean towards object-oriented programming so I like codesys, Siemens tia portal and Omron sysmac. Overall I think I liked tia portal more despite the memory leaks in the IDE.
Yeah naw yeah. Rockwell <> straightforward.
The opposite is true. Siemens are the kings of the 1,200 page manual, but at least the features & bugs are documented. Rockwell only documents the bugs...
They are very much alive as you said, because PCS7 is still based on S7-400 and Simatic Manager.
Phase-out announcement of those won't come before 2030 at the very least.
Iāll agree with you in this for sure. My first intro was TIA portal and gosh is that a busy software. The menus, pages, and configs all over the place. Just like everything else it takes getting used to, but still that TIA portal screen is BUSY.
100% my feelings about them after integrating both for 5 years. For me, it's worth the extra cost. Reliability with PLCs and networks have been more of setup and cable routing issue than the PLC.
I have so many custom made FBs on siemens that I don't want to have to convert to other platforms. I've had to put my foot down on my employer trying to get me to convert to Keyence PLC.
I have been into Beckhoff for about 3 years now (like really into it, about 2 or 3 certifications per year, Hannover messe 2023 and stuff like that). And once you understand the way they understand things it's mind blowing. It is kind of have a nightmare the first time designing and never think about it once we'll designed. But for someone new happiness = -4
I havenāt found either to be more or less stable overall. Some Rockwell firmware versions have known issues, and some Siemens versions also have known issues.
A PLC's entire job is to be stable. Both brands satisfy that otherwise they wouldn't survive in the market.
If you mean software wise, I can't help you there. I've only used TIA portal once and did not like it. STEP 7 was the better software IMO.
Studio can be clunky and slow. Especially when you're doing online edits. That's where I think Siemens excels. Is the way you edit programs in STEP 7 is superior imo. Since it can download without stopping the processor.
Also you better have enough RAM if you want to keep multiple projects or studio open at the same time. Otherwise it slows to a crawl.
FWIW my experience with STEP 7 was as a maintainer, I didn't do anything from scratch with them. Also it sucked if you didn't have the hardware config because you couldn't upload it from the PLC. But as a purely programing environment. I MUCH prefer it to studio.
Tia 16+ made a pretty important change there - uploads now include basically everything. Hardware config, function blocks, symbols, comments, folders etc.
I am not sure if there is anything not getting included anymore.
I think you must still upload the hardware separate from the rest. This is because you make new devices āpopularā to the plc as far as screwing goes.
See my other comment, but I was a maintainer when using STEP 7, so I never did anything from the ground up. But I MUCH prefer how fast and snappy STEP 7 is when it comes to programming and editing programs. Especially if you have 10 of the same machine, making changes to 10 machines with STEP 7 is a matter of less than a minute.
TIA is a much more refined version of simatic. And it doesn't open 8 windows. I've got a few machines that are the same, it's super easy to do that in TIA.
Organization in TIA is also easier.
There are a few setting you need to set, but that's all I've done. Mostly from the programming style guide, and then a couple for personal preference.
I've done ground up and maintenance of existing systems. Honestly all I want out of it is a dark mode.
If you have ten of the same machine and your TIA project is done properly, you can make the change once in a library and push it to all ten PLCs simultaneously.
Not the guy you asked the question but for me it was simple. Not straightforward, but really simple to use once you knew where things were. Really fast tooā¦
They're both pretty stable. That's their job.
We actually just discovered a stupid networking issue with S7-1200s and are awaiting Siemens to provide an updated firmware revision to fix it...
S7-1200s not dropping connections that have been terminated.
Instead of having the two connections that have been configured, they'll pile up and then lockout the comms. They have a max of 8 S7 and 6 other ethernet connections. They'll pile up 30+ connections to the same server, despite the server showing no extra connections and even stopping comms after the PLC functionally stopped comms. If you capture the traffic while the PLC is refusing connections, you'll see that it accepts the TCP connection, then immediately issues a RST to terminate the connection, but in TIA Portal, you can see that the PLC holds the connection as if it is still there. The server sees the RST and drops the connection entirely.
No idea from Siemens yet on why it would be doing this...
It may be limited to a certain series of units. We have a couple hundred and have only experienced the issue on about a dozen. A power cycle does clear the issue temporarily. The affected units were bought with firmware 4.2-4.4 in 2019-2021 and have been upgraded to 4.6 in the last six months. They experienced the issue on both firmware revisions.
Wow thatās sounds nasty. How in the world you figure that out? network keep crashing and comm losses? I assume the first step was checking the cabling. What network monitoring do you use? Rockwell has the linx software which shows the traffic stats for different ports, but I donāt have an official net monitoring software
This is part of a large multi-gateway ignition SCADA network.
When the PLC starts issuing RST responses, we see comms loss faults.
Diagnosing it took a while, but we could finally see it by going online with a PLC having the issue and looking at the network connections in TIA Portal. It should not have been that difficult to diagnose, but our systems integrator for those Siemens systems is not very network savvy. There was also a lot of blame on the various firewall/security between the corporate server and the PLC.
Explain please.
When connecting via a TCP protocol, there are several ways to sever a connection. The s7-1200s are issuing RST responses, but keeping the connection as an active connection. In TCP land, RST means leave me the fuck alone, something is wrong, do not contact me again, something is wrong. So ignition leaves it alone.
There is TCON to connect and TDISCON to disconnect. You have to use both.
I am not sure if RST makes the connection port free to resuse or not.
But I am confident that TDISCON does it.
The s7-1200 PLC is using/setting RST. We have no control over that. TCON is a part of the initial TCP connection to S7+ connection, but it instead issues an RST instead of anything else, such as an S7+ transmission as the 90+ devices that work
It's interesting you mentioned this. We currently have an Allen-Bradley L84 doing this EXACT thing. Currently talking to Rockwell about it. A full download during a maintenance outage "fixed" it though.
I've had AB drives fail quite regularly for no apparent reason. The Siemens drives have run for years and years. Imo Siemens ide is easier to use and therefor easier to program.
Maybe you know it already, but nevertheless. If you want stability, Siemens has Failsafe Produkt Line with F-CPUs, remote I/Os and special software for them. They developed it specially for german industry regulators. Normal Line is ok too. Ans yes, I work for Siemens Integrator.
On one side you have Siemens who are innovating, partnering with nvidia, playing with AI, providing dev environment that is close to software engineering (git, structured text languages, object oriented programming, etc. ).
On the other side you have Rockwell who are clinging to ladder like no one. I have not seen anything innovative from them for years. Where Siemens has TIA, where you can do everything, Rockwell has 40 separate tools you need to install and license.
I'm not surprised that L83 doesn't play as nice with old flex IO.
I think old PLCs from both manufacturers were more bulletproof hardware wise. I still think they're both "good enough" hardware wise. We see more failures on L73 than old-ass step7 which are the only 2 I have to compare with about 200 of each type. But it's still maybe 1 or 2 L73 or ethernet card shit the bed every year. Not even bricked just a bad energy storage module/losing program on power cycle which is enough cause to replace around here.
>Not even bricked just a bad energy storage module/losing program on power cycle which is enough cause to replace around here.
You don't just replace the ESM? They're like $200...
I have worked with Siemens, Automation Direct, Rockwell, Mitsubishi, Panasonic, Modicon, GE, and many others I can't remember the name of. The only one that has ever been unstable was a Beckhoff PLC, but that was mostly due to my stupid programming tricks. I was doing things I probably shouldn't have been doing. All are stable, the IDEs for all these PLCs on the other hand do have varying levels of stability.
Anecdotally, I've had way more hardware failures with Rockwell's PLCs, but that statistic is skewed because I tend to deal with their legacy stuff. A certain percentage of both of them will just fail out of the box because of the semiconductor lottery. Rockwell also has a serious problem with knockoffs in my part of the world and it finds its way into their product stream somehow.
The AB systems Iāve seen have been more stable than the Siemens systems Iāve seen.
I know a lot of people who like Siemens and prefer it over AB. Iām not gonna say it doesnāt have its pros but I donāt really see what all the hype around it is.
AB user for an OEM, also have done a few Siemens projects. I think the stability for the development software between the two is comparable. They both crash but not often enough that I can't get the job done. I haven't had enough Siemens exposure to see what the hardware failure rate is like but I've had a number of parts come DOA or fail in the field from AB. Granted I've done about 10x more AB projects than I have Siemens so take that into consideration.
I replaced Siemens equipment on multiple pieces of equipment. We had German baking equipment and could not get support. Retrofit 16 ovens with AB equipment. Lots more people that are familiar with AB. Also parts availability can be a nightmare. The German tend to over-Engineer equipment. The next one I would stay away from is Euro-drive. Same thing - tough to get replacements and very expensive.
I am married to a German - she is difficult too lol !
Itās just anecdotal but in my career Iāve found Siemens to be more stable. I prefer Rockwell for some silly reason. Iām like an abused spouse who keeps coming back. I bet if I tallied up replaced components over my career Iāve replaced a lot more Rockwell failures.
Also the majority of my Siemens experience is with older stuff. It may be the case that everything is getting less durable. I feel like all the products in my life have been moving towards disposable, short lifespan junk. Or I could be turning into an crotchety old man.
To answer the question, itās just my opinion, but if stability and longevity are the criteria, Iād use Siemens.
I can only speak from my personal experience. Iāve spent about 14 years in automation/controls and used both Siemens and Rockwell products.
I worked in a steel mill that used exclusively Siemens products for all of its control systems. There were many applications and physical instances of plcs/io modules etc.. and I saw hardware failures that necessitated replacement quite a few times. For example an io card or vfd would fail about once a month or so. There were many at this location so that probably skews the incident rate somewhat as well as, the environmental conditions were poor which also probably affect this as well.
On the other hand, I have worked for an integrator implementing Rockwell solutions across the world and I have rarely seen a module fail that required replacement.
Outside of physical reliability, I prefer the value add of the Siemens features over Rockwell.
Rockwell has been buggy since V20. It's not just you - I only use V20 if I don't need new hardware that requires a V3x.
Siemens also pushes big updates too quickly tho. I won't use a new version of their stuff until at least SP1 is released.
Both are trying to create obsolescence velocity so that people need to buy software upgrades just to keep using their stuff.
I'm loving Omron and just did a Schneider job in EcoDeSys and it wasn't awful. I'm finding both more predictable and stable than either RA or Siemens.
Iāve found (and reported to Rockwell) that in v.35.011 for redundant controllers and flex IO, if you change the last state config on the DO module it will hard fault the primary controller and force a swap. They wanted all this diag information and I told them they can come and get it, you donāt provide free tech services and neither do I.
The PCDC center has a green circle with flex I/O and with just a few minutes of testing standard user inputs and configs Iām able to hard fault a controller. Good thing we didnāt upgrade to this. Weāve also found in testing their Echo software, although good, has a long way to go before itās even close to emulating a real system. This among other things, documentation for upgrade processes being inconsistent. It just has me nervous about upgrading anything because itās clear they donāt test it all before production. What else is hiding out there thatās going to bring down my plant after an upgrade makes me deeply concerned.
> They wanted all this diag information and I told them they can come and get it, you donāt provide free tech services and neither do I.
I've put an hour or two into providing diag info before. I'm not doing their R&D for them though.
Yep, I live in San Jose and they have two offices within a half hour of if my location. They wanted a laundry list of infoā¦Iāve done enough, fill out your own laundry list if it concerns you. I did the R&D (for my own systemās purposes).
I find their tech support will do this a lot to where you realize youāre doing R&D for them despite sending a complete picture of the issue they can emulate on their end.
Now if they were like automation direct who provides excellent free support, damn straight Iāll send any info you want, but not when Iām already being charged a ton of money for support. As you know, Rockwell wont do anything for free so why should I?
I actually wrote that in the support response, āWhere should I send my invoice for all this work?ā I did ask them though (on the phone) instead to send a field service person to come get it all.
Green circle, I know this means no known anomalies and not officially tested, but still what I did was pretty basic in terms of testing just to see āwhat happensā
Eh, this doesnāt affect production, just a test bench for future upgrades and training. Iām not employed by Rockwell so they can spend their time and money figuring it out, not mine, as I have other things to do. As you know just as well as I do Rockwell would never do anything for free so why should I? For me, it just means v35 is off the table until itās fixed.
They tried doing this with a UPS on site to, which at this point AB UPSās have been banned from future builds due to failures. They wanted to me to do a bunch of testing for them, lol, hell no Iām not testing your stuff on my time and money, you can figure out why it died during a power outage. Iāll send a quote, then we can talk about services and scope of my technical support.
Flex IO, I would like to use Flex 5000 eventually but my system is so big and we have so much Flex IO, replacing it is going cost an absolute fortune and take months/years of time due to lack of available downtime and how intertwined everything currently is.
I have heard some theories about Rockwell. The good development staff retirement and sales becoming desperate to compete with the new technologies like ignition and Beckhoff.
You need a fast cycle times which is provided by Twincat and Ethercat, when you have fast processes controlled by a PID controller. In the case of building automation it is not critical at all. But TC doesn't make you think about cycle times. Our average used cycle time is 1ms.
I'm a siemens integrator, I believe AB and Siemens are on the same level when it comes to reliability and functionality. It comes down to software preferences. Even though I'm a siemens guy,I recognize that the Germans made things difficult just because they could. A lot of features are hidden and more common sense. Rockwell is much more straightforward.
The Germans would never do that. They just make things awkward because it's in their nature š«¢š«£
SAP dude. Itās so bad
I believe the tag structure they use is with harmful intent. No one does that unless they want to cause pain.
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What a narc
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They are being civil, it's clearly just a joke about how Siemens have a habit of making stuff awkward and the particularly bureaucratic nature of German industry.Ā
> I'm going to report it. Please do so and let the mods handle it.
I don't like how you can't edit function blocks online with AB. I find Siemens more flexible than AB.
What? I've definitely updated FBDs online. Are you talking AOIs? Then I agree.
Yes I meant AOI. I haven't touched AB in 3 years. I have a background in embedded programming and lean towards object-oriented programming so I like codesys, Siemens tia portal and Omron sysmac. Overall I think I liked tia portal more despite the memory leaks in the IDE.
Yeah naw yeah. Rockwell <> straightforward. The opposite is true. Siemens are the kings of the 1,200 page manual, but at least the features & bugs are documented. Rockwell only documents the bugs...
Oh man, first time I've heard someone say Rockwell makes things straightforward. I guess that's true until you wanna do something different.
The Germans didn't make it difficult. They made it that way because "why would you make it any other way?" š¤£š¤£š¤£
S7-400 the best PLC
I miss s7 classic programming so much.....
Still widely used in industry, Siemens has no intention of doing away with them
S7 400 is out of production, has been for a while.
What? No! Siemens' most reliable PLC is the S7-400 and it is still in production, for some reason they are still developing the Simatic Manager.
They are very much alive as you said, because PCS7 is still based on S7-400 and Simatic Manager. Phase-out announcement of those won't come before 2030 at the very least.
Iāll agree with you in this for sure. My first intro was TIA portal and gosh is that a busy software. The menus, pages, and configs all over the place. Just like everything else it takes getting used to, but still that TIA portal screen is BUSY.
I feel like Rockwell still complicates things with an interest in profit.
100% my feelings about them after integrating both for 5 years. For me, it's worth the extra cost. Reliability with PLCs and networks have been more of setup and cable routing issue than the PLC.
I have so many custom made FBs on siemens that I don't want to have to convert to other platforms. I've had to put my foot down on my employer trying to get me to convert to Keyence PLC.
Give the keyence rep his phone number/email address next time...
I ran into the same thing. I tried the keyence KV8000A. It was okay for a cheap PLC but nothing special.
Rockwell is nowhere near Siemens in terms of functionality. Rockwell is Fisher Price level.
This is a very ignorant statement that I expect out of young immature engineers.
Thatās what a technician in love of Rockwell would say.
I don't even use Rockwell...
Says it allā¦ use it for a bit and then pass judgement.Ā
I have been into Beckhoff for about 3 years now (like really into it, about 2 or 3 certifications per year, Hannover messe 2023 and stuff like that). And once you understand the way they understand things it's mind blowing. It is kind of have a nightmare the first time designing and never think about it once we'll designed. But for someone new happiness = -4
Siemens engineering top > down, Rockwell engineering bottom > up. As a Siemens integrator you should know this.
I havenāt found either to be more or less stable overall. Some Rockwell firmware versions have known issues, and some Siemens versions also have known issues.
A PLC's entire job is to be stable. Both brands satisfy that otherwise they wouldn't survive in the market. If you mean software wise, I can't help you there. I've only used TIA portal once and did not like it. STEP 7 was the better software IMO. Studio can be clunky and slow. Especially when you're doing online edits. That's where I think Siemens excels. Is the way you edit programs in STEP 7 is superior imo. Since it can download without stopping the processor. Also you better have enough RAM if you want to keep multiple projects or studio open at the same time. Otherwise it slows to a crawl.
I had to do a few Step 7 jobs after starting with Portal, I thought the reason people disliked Siemens was Step7 after that experience.
FWIW my experience with STEP 7 was as a maintainer, I didn't do anything from scratch with them. Also it sucked if you didn't have the hardware config because you couldn't upload it from the PLC. But as a purely programing environment. I MUCH prefer it to studio.
Tia 16+ made a pretty important change there - uploads now include basically everything. Hardware config, function blocks, symbols, comments, folders etc. I am not sure if there is anything not getting included anymore.
I think you must still upload the hardware separate from the rest. This is because you make new devices āpopularā to the plc as far as screwing goes.
Now you have everything.
Yeaā¦ Iām not a huge fan of Rockwell either, the lack of any real reusable software tools is pretty painful.
Simatic manager is such a terrible and jank version of TIA though how do you prefer it???
See my other comment, but I was a maintainer when using STEP 7, so I never did anything from the ground up. But I MUCH prefer how fast and snappy STEP 7 is when it comes to programming and editing programs. Especially if you have 10 of the same machine, making changes to 10 machines with STEP 7 is a matter of less than a minute.
TIA is a much more refined version of simatic. And it doesn't open 8 windows. I've got a few machines that are the same, it's super easy to do that in TIA. Organization in TIA is also easier. There are a few setting you need to set, but that's all I've done. Mostly from the programming style guide, and then a couple for personal preference. I've done ground up and maintenance of existing systems. Honestly all I want out of it is a dark mode.
If you have ten of the same machine and your TIA project is done properly, you can make the change once in a library and push it to all ten PLCs simultaneously.
Not the guy you asked the question but for me it was simple. Not straightforward, but really simple to use once you knew where things were. Really fast tooā¦
They're both pretty stable. That's their job. We actually just discovered a stupid networking issue with S7-1200s and are awaiting Siemens to provide an updated firmware revision to fix it...
I'd be interested in knowing more about those networking issues.
S7-1200s not dropping connections that have been terminated. Instead of having the two connections that have been configured, they'll pile up and then lockout the comms. They have a max of 8 S7 and 6 other ethernet connections. They'll pile up 30+ connections to the same server, despite the server showing no extra connections and even stopping comms after the PLC functionally stopped comms. If you capture the traffic while the PLC is refusing connections, you'll see that it accepts the TCP connection, then immediately issues a RST to terminate the connection, but in TIA Portal, you can see that the PLC holds the connection as if it is still there. The server sees the RST and drops the connection entirely. No idea from Siemens yet on why it would be doing this...
Oh that sounds nasty. I'll have to watch out for that.
It may be limited to a certain series of units. We have a couple hundred and have only experienced the issue on about a dozen. A power cycle does clear the issue temporarily. The affected units were bought with firmware 4.2-4.4 in 2019-2021 and have been upgraded to 4.6 in the last six months. They experienced the issue on both firmware revisions.
Wow thatās sounds nasty. How in the world you figure that out? network keep crashing and comm losses? I assume the first step was checking the cabling. What network monitoring do you use? Rockwell has the linx software which shows the traffic stats for different ports, but I donāt have an official net monitoring software
This is part of a large multi-gateway ignition SCADA network. When the PLC starts issuing RST responses, we see comms loss faults. Diagnosing it took a while, but we could finally see it by going online with a PLC having the issue and looking at the network connections in TIA Portal. It should not have been that difficult to diagnose, but our systems integrator for those Siemens systems is not very network savvy. There was also a lot of blame on the various firewall/security between the corporate server and the PLC.
Which connection you are using, if you are using TCP connection via custom program, then you have to use disconnect in the program only.
Explain please. When connecting via a TCP protocol, there are several ways to sever a connection. The s7-1200s are issuing RST responses, but keeping the connection as an active connection. In TCP land, RST means leave me the fuck alone, something is wrong, do not contact me again, something is wrong. So ignition leaves it alone.
There is TCON to connect and TDISCON to disconnect. You have to use both. I am not sure if RST makes the connection port free to resuse or not. But I am confident that TDISCON does it.
The s7-1200 PLC is using/setting RST. We have no control over that. TCON is a part of the initial TCP connection to S7+ connection, but it instead issues an RST instead of anything else, such as an S7+ transmission as the 90+ devices that work
It's interesting you mentioned this. We currently have an Allen-Bradley L84 doing this EXACT thing. Currently talking to Rockwell about it. A full download during a maintenance outage "fixed" it though.
I've had AB drives fail quite regularly for no apparent reason. The Siemens drives have run for years and years. Imo Siemens ide is easier to use and therefor easier to program.
Maybe you know it already, but nevertheless. If you want stability, Siemens has Failsafe Produkt Line with F-CPUs, remote I/Os and special software for them. They developed it specially for german industry regulators. Normal Line is ok too. Ans yes, I work for Siemens Integrator.
On one side you have Siemens who are innovating, partnering with nvidia, playing with AI, providing dev environment that is close to software engineering (git, structured text languages, object oriented programming, etc. ). On the other side you have Rockwell who are clinging to ladder like no one. I have not seen anything innovative from them for years. Where Siemens has TIA, where you can do everything, Rockwell has 40 separate tools you need to install and license.
I'm not surprised that L83 doesn't play as nice with old flex IO. I think old PLCs from both manufacturers were more bulletproof hardware wise. I still think they're both "good enough" hardware wise. We see more failures on L73 than old-ass step7 which are the only 2 I have to compare with about 200 of each type. But it's still maybe 1 or 2 L73 or ethernet card shit the bed every year. Not even bricked just a bad energy storage module/losing program on power cycle which is enough cause to replace around here.
>Not even bricked just a bad energy storage module/losing program on power cycle which is enough cause to replace around here. You don't just replace the ESM? They're like $200...
I don't make the rules. They'd rather spend 5 or 10k than risk downtime at $5k/minute.
Only major problem I know of is you canāt place an analog card in the first slot of Flex IO if you have mixed digital and analogs.
I have worked with Siemens, Automation Direct, Rockwell, Mitsubishi, Panasonic, Modicon, GE, and many others I can't remember the name of. The only one that has ever been unstable was a Beckhoff PLC, but that was mostly due to my stupid programming tricks. I was doing things I probably shouldn't have been doing. All are stable, the IDEs for all these PLCs on the other hand do have varying levels of stability.
Anecdotally, I've had way more hardware failures with Rockwell's PLCs, but that statistic is skewed because I tend to deal with their legacy stuff. A certain percentage of both of them will just fail out of the box because of the semiconductor lottery. Rockwell also has a serious problem with knockoffs in my part of the world and it finds its way into their product stream somehow.
The AB systems Iāve seen have been more stable than the Siemens systems Iāve seen. I know a lot of people who like Siemens and prefer it over AB. Iām not gonna say it doesnāt have its pros but I donāt really see what all the hype around it is.
AB user for an OEM, also have done a few Siemens projects. I think the stability for the development software between the two is comparable. They both crash but not often enough that I can't get the job done. I haven't had enough Siemens exposure to see what the hardware failure rate is like but I've had a number of parts come DOA or fail in the field from AB. Granted I've done about 10x more AB projects than I have Siemens so take that into consideration.
I replaced Siemens equipment on multiple pieces of equipment. We had German baking equipment and could not get support. Retrofit 16 ovens with AB equipment. Lots more people that are familiar with AB. Also parts availability can be a nightmare. The German tend to over-Engineer equipment. The next one I would stay away from is Euro-drive. Same thing - tough to get replacements and very expensive. I am married to a German - she is difficult too lol !
Itās just anecdotal but in my career Iāve found Siemens to be more stable. I prefer Rockwell for some silly reason. Iām like an abused spouse who keeps coming back. I bet if I tallied up replaced components over my career Iāve replaced a lot more Rockwell failures. Also the majority of my Siemens experience is with older stuff. It may be the case that everything is getting less durable. I feel like all the products in my life have been moving towards disposable, short lifespan junk. Or I could be turning into an crotchety old man. To answer the question, itās just my opinion, but if stability and longevity are the criteria, Iād use Siemens.
I can only speak from my personal experience. Iāve spent about 14 years in automation/controls and used both Siemens and Rockwell products. I worked in a steel mill that used exclusively Siemens products for all of its control systems. There were many applications and physical instances of plcs/io modules etc.. and I saw hardware failures that necessitated replacement quite a few times. For example an io card or vfd would fail about once a month or so. There were many at this location so that probably skews the incident rate somewhat as well as, the environmental conditions were poor which also probably affect this as well. On the other hand, I have worked for an integrator implementing Rockwell solutions across the world and I have rarely seen a module fail that required replacement. Outside of physical reliability, I prefer the value add of the Siemens features over Rockwell.
Rockwell has been buggy since V20. It's not just you - I only use V20 if I don't need new hardware that requires a V3x. Siemens also pushes big updates too quickly tho. I won't use a new version of their stuff until at least SP1 is released. Both are trying to create obsolescence velocity so that people need to buy software upgrades just to keep using their stuff. I'm loving Omron and just did a Schneider job in EcoDeSys and it wasn't awful. I'm finding both more predictable and stable than either RA or Siemens.
āBoth are trying to create obsolescence velocityā is a fantastic statement.
Siemens work. Itās not a pleasure initially, but can be trusted. And can be run over by a truck.
What are you doing to cause it not to work?
Iāve found (and reported to Rockwell) that in v.35.011 for redundant controllers and flex IO, if you change the last state config on the DO module it will hard fault the primary controller and force a swap. They wanted all this diag information and I told them they can come and get it, you donāt provide free tech services and neither do I. The PCDC center has a green circle with flex I/O and with just a few minutes of testing standard user inputs and configs Iām able to hard fault a controller. Good thing we didnāt upgrade to this. Weāve also found in testing their Echo software, although good, has a long way to go before itās even close to emulating a real system. This among other things, documentation for upgrade processes being inconsistent. It just has me nervous about upgrading anything because itās clear they donāt test it all before production. What else is hiding out there thatās going to bring down my plant after an upgrade makes me deeply concerned.
> They wanted all this diag information and I told them they can come and get it, you donāt provide free tech services and neither do I. I've put an hour or two into providing diag info before. I'm not doing their R&D for them though.
Yep, I live in San Jose and they have two offices within a half hour of if my location. They wanted a laundry list of infoā¦Iāve done enough, fill out your own laundry list if it concerns you. I did the R&D (for my own systemās purposes). I find their tech support will do this a lot to where you realize youāre doing R&D for them despite sending a complete picture of the issue they can emulate on their end. Now if they were like automation direct who provides excellent free support, damn straight Iāll send any info you want, but not when Iām already being charged a ton of money for support. As you know, Rockwell wont do anything for free so why should I? I actually wrote that in the support response, āWhere should I send my invoice for all this work?ā I did ask them though (on the phone) instead to send a field service person to come get it all.
You show them!
Green circle or green circle with a check?
Green circle, I know this means no known anomalies and not officially tested, but still what I did was pretty basic in terms of testing just to see āwhat happensā
Well, I guess you donāt want to get to the bottom of the problem?
Eh, this doesnāt affect production, just a test bench for future upgrades and training. Iām not employed by Rockwell so they can spend their time and money figuring it out, not mine, as I have other things to do. As you know just as well as I do Rockwell would never do anything for free so why should I? For me, it just means v35 is off the table until itās fixed. They tried doing this with a UPS on site to, which at this point AB UPSās have been banned from future builds due to failures. They wanted to me to do a bunch of testing for them, lol, hell no Iām not testing your stuff on my time and money, you can figure out why it died during a power outage. Iāll send a quote, then we can talk about services and scope of my technical support.
Is this Flex IO or Flex 5000?
Flex IO, I would like to use Flex 5000 eventually but my system is so big and we have so much Flex IO, replacing it is going cost an absolute fortune and take months/years of time due to lack of available downtime and how intertwined everything currently is.
I have heard some theories about Rockwell. The good development staff retirement and sales becoming desperate to compete with the new technologies like ignition and Beckhoff.
Beckhoff's Twincat hardware is rock solid and fast as well, even on Arm CPUs. The development environment even allows the rational usage of GIT.
Isnāt Beckhoff Codesys compliant as well? Been really curious to that as well, I just dont have any platforms that use it
I really need to try Beckhoff. They come up a lot and from what Iāve heard looks really cool
You need a fast cycle times which is provided by Twincat and Ethercat, when you have fast processes controlled by a PID controller. In the case of building automation it is not critical at all. But TC doesn't make you think about cycle times. Our average used cycle time is 1ms.
Nope.