Further to our recent Twincat blog we also needed to provide a DNP3 communications connection to the local Electricity Utility. Once again we were able to supply a solution because our PLC was also running Windows along with Twincat 3. PBScontrol is a 3rd party provider with a DNP3 slave driver that runs on Windows and has an API interface to the Twincat runtime environment.
A Configurator made it easy to develop the config file for the DNP3 driver on the PLC that mapped the Twincat PLC variables to DNP3 tags for communication.
Automation Controllers of today have to be able to handle a myriad of communication protocols, preferably without costing the Automation Engineer an arm or leg, and work reliably. In a recent Trigeneration project we implemented OPCuA, Modbus (Server and Slave), Mbus, Bacnet and DNP3 communication protocols on the networked CX2020 PLC’s from Beckhoff.
