History

WinCC OA is provided to users as a clean sheet. It has incredibly powerful ways of creating reusable and self-configuring objects, but this is “an exercise left to the user,” as my old college professors would say. Rather than continually reinvent the wheel each project, we decided to distill best practices into a set of tools that integrate seamlessly into the Siemens PLC Open Library. This resulted in the alpha version of a WinCC OA Open library in July 2017.

This initial version was a great start for clarifying how to use the new WinCC OA Object-Oriented CTRL++ language that had just been released. Several revisions later, we have an extensible code base covering the key elements of the PLC Open Library and are ready to share it with the world.

Components

This latest version has implemented the critical portions of the PLC Open Library with objects for:

• Motor – Contactor
• Motor – VFD
• Pump – Contactor
• Pump – VFD
• Valve – Solenoid
• Valve – Analog
• System Control Object
• Interlock Object
• PID Compact Object

There are plenty of helper objects, such as the text indicator and entry objects not listed here that are used by the objects above. These can often be utilized by themselves as part of your project or embedded into your own custom objects!

Look and Feel

These objects have behavior and visualization that is similar to the PLC Open Library while still extending the functionality to provide for the benefits of using WinCC OA.

One of those extra benefits that WinCC OA provides is the ability to use color schemes. Color schemes are sets of named colors that can be swapped into place on a system during runtime. This ability allows for implementations like day/night mode.

In this case, we implemented the DMC Open Library standard color set and a High-Performance HMI color set. You can create your own color set and customize the color scheme to whatever works for your project.

Utilities

Tag creation in SCADA systems can be a daunting task. This task is especially true when you have smart objects with a rich tag structure like the PLC Open Library.

As a result, we needed to create a better way to manage tag generation for the Open Library. The included tool allows a DB export from a Siemens PLC to be converted to an import file for WinCC OA. With the included capability to handle descriptions, units, formatting, and naming, the work of days can be reduced to minutes with this tool!

Conclusion

WinCC OA is a very powerful platform that gives the user a level of flexibility and capability not seen in other platforms. This power comes at the cost of increased development effort to create a set of objects for any given project.

The Open Library toolset helps bring a robust set of pre-built objects to WinCC OA and provides a base to build new objects from without having to start from a clean sheet each time.

Learn more about DMC’s HMI Programming and WinCC OA services and expertise. Contact us for more information or any project inquiries.

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