Well, this looks to be fun. I'm looking at a near-future assignment to retrofit ProfiNet into some KRC2s (ed2005) in the field at a customer facility. Now, I've never done this, but I've heard lots of horror stories about it. I have a copy of the manual, which I plan to read thoroughly, but what I'm hoping to learn from the forum is all those little niggling details that never seem to make it into the manuals -- the gotchas, the little tricks, the incorrect key sequence that sets the robot on fire... you know, those things.
Retrofitting ProfiNet onto KRC2s
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SkyeFire -
January 24, 2018 at 5:01 PM -
Thread is marked as Resolved.
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no worries, i have confidence in you
i don't recall adding profinet to KRC2, looking at the manual it looks straight forward.
on KRC4 it was very straight forward and much like EthernetIP setup once it was clear that device name is not just some arbitrary string to show in messages - it had to match the name used in PLC config. -
on krc2 the profinet project is sent to card from the line pc using step 7
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Hm... I'm not sure we have S7 anymore, just TIA-Portal. Are there any backwards-compatibility issues I need to look out for?
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TIA should be fine as far as I am aware
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Hello, there isnt much problem to setup it from robot side on KRC2... i had a couple of KRC2 to setup with PROFINET, just have to be carefull about firmware version used on robot and TIA to use the same type... and use correct drivers in TIA, cause at first i had issue when you unplugged the cable from PROfinet card the inputs stayed on... but it was issue on PLC side not using correct drivers and different firmware in TIA amd transfering on the PROFINET card...
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Hm... in this particular instance, I need to connect the KRC2 to an AnyBus bridge device to, well, "bridge" to an incompatible bus. It would have been simpler to use DeviceNet on the KRC2 end, but customer requirements .....
So, I'll need to set up the KRC2 as a ProfiNet scanner with a single subordinate device (the bridge) with a moderately sized block of polled I/O (~16 bytes or so).
Since I know that the firmware on the AnyBus device is unalterable, I'm hoping I don't run into any issues as you describe. With any luck, this should be simple, as the AnyBus device should appear as a simple I/O device to the KRC2's scanner.
I just remember how incredibly painful it was to set up ProfiBus on KRC2s, unless you had a Master's degree in "how to use Siemens software," because NCM was so finicky and so poorly documented. I once found the hard way that only the NCM that came bundled with the KRC2 ProfiBus drivers would build a working scan list file -- building an identical network under Step7 produced a file that the KRC2 couldn't use. Despite the fact that everyone I could ask insisted that the KUKA-bundled NCM was identical to the Step7 100%....
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I just remember how incredibly painful it was to set up ProfiBus on KRC2s, unless you had a Master's degree in "how to use Siemens software," because NCM was so finicky and so poorly documented. I once found the hard way that only the NCM that came bundled with the KRC2 ProfiBus drivers would build a working scan list file -- building an identical network under Step7 produced a file that the KRC2 couldn't use. Despite the fact that everyone I could ask insisted that the KUKA-bundled NCM was identical to the Step7 100%....Have done this sometimes, with NCM and Step7 and had no problems at all. Just last month I have done this at retrofitted robots and Step 7, no issues.
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Huh! Well, I can't explain it, but I ended up spending two entire days on that issue trying to figure out what was going on. I built the entire network, piece by piece, identically in NCM and in a "full" Step7 install, on different computers, generated the LDB file, and imported it into the robot. Multiple times, starting from scratch, to ensure I hadn't just typo'd something.
I could never get the robot to accept the LDB file generated by Step7. It didn't generate any errors, aside from the generic "error reading/writing driver" message, and the PB log file didn't show any errors reading in the LDB file either. But with the NCM-generated file, the network would work. With the LDB file generated from an identical network in Step 7, I could never get communications. It made no sense, and everyone told me it was impossible, but it was definitely not just my imagination. It's one of a long list of painful experiences that make me leery of using Siemens for anything.
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NCM is an old software and it works but LDB files it generates seem to have problem with newer KRC2s. Using Step7 worked for me without issue (Step7 v5.4 and newer).
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Hm! The KRC2s I had this happen on were actually some of the very last generation -- ed2005s shipped with KSS 5.6, about... two years before the KRC4 hit the general market, IIRC.
It's one of the reasons I've always had a soft spot for DeviceNet (at least, as implemented on the KRC1&2). It may be a creaky, cranky old thing, but no proprietary 3rd-party software, no proprietary-format binary-blob config files, simple Telnet diagnostics -- as long as your baud rates matched, you could just throw random devices onto the bus and query them for their critical settings, and it generally Just Worked.
Then again, I'm still complaining about being forced to use WorkVisual instead of hand-editing .INI files, so I may just be showing my age and general curmudgeonliness....