TwinCAT automation software from Beckhoff has a fundamental advantage of the openness of its PC-based control and the resulting array of connectivity options with other systems number. Based on this, there is a new add-on to enable easy and efficient communication with Siemens S7 controllers.

TwinCAT 3 offers numerous options for connecting TCP/IP-based third party systems to the main control program: OPC UA, MQTT, HTTPS and Modbus are only a few prominent examples of an entire range of communication protocols. The TwinCAT S7 Communication (TF6620) function now expands this broad spectrum to include the S7 communication protocol.

This product implementation enables the reading and writing of variables from an S7 controller. The PLC application program carries this out directly – either via dynamically parameterizable PLC function blocks or via easily configurable I/O mapping. No additional hardware is required and the local TCP/IP network serves as the transport medium.