I am currently writing my bachelor’s thesis at OTH Regensburg and I have about three weeks left until the submission deadline.
The topic of my thesis is testing the interoperability of different PLCs and devices using OPC UA. So far, I have already tested Siemens and Schneider devices, and now I would like to include a B&R X20CP1684 controller in the comparison.
Unfortunately, I am a complete beginner with Automation Studio 6 and have no experience with B&R at all. Since time is running out and I still need the B&R controller for my comparison, I wanted to ask if someone could provide me with some guidance or a step-by-step explanation of how to proceed.
What I specifically need to know is:
How to set up an OPC UA server on my PLC in Automation Studio 6.
How to set up an OPC UA client.
What the most common or recommended approaches are for doing this in B&R.
In addition, I want to evaluate interoperability using a set of test cases that I collected from the OPC Foundation. Therefore, I would also like to know how the following OPC UA features can be implemented in B&R:
Methods
without parameters
with input-only parameters
with struct parameters
with in/out parameters
Alarms
Subscriptions
Users & Roles
Security
Read
Write
I’m not looking for someone to do the work for me—I would simply appreciate some guidance on how these features are typically implemented in B&R so that I can implement and test them myself.
If there are any tutorials, example projects, documentation, or other resources that you would recommend, I would be very grateful.
Hi Lisa,
I don’t know if you’re already familiar with it, but B&R has the Education Network specifically for this kind of questions. The staff there are dedicated to helping high school and college students. During my final project, they patiently helped me via video conferences and emails and were always available. Unfortunately, the website only lists general contact information, but maybe a B&R employee can send you the right contact information via direct message.
I’ve actually been reading through the forum and the documentation for several hours already and have been experimenting with different sample projects. Since I’m completely new to B&R and Automation Studio, it’s sometimes difficult to understand the overall workflow.
What would really help me is a short step-by-step guide on how to get an OPC UA server and client up and running in Automation Studio 6, and what the typical B&R-specific workflow looks like.
I’m also interested in any general advice or common pitfalls when implementing OPC UA communication in B&R (e.g. things that are different from Siemens or Schneider, libraries to use, recommended project structure, etc.).
Even a few pointers or links to the most relevant examples would already help me a lot.
I’d recommend taking a look at the OPC UA section of the Automation Studio Help. There’s some good information in there about how to configure the project for different use cases.
If you want to see sample code, I’m pretty sure there are Library Samples available (via the AS Toolbox) for both the AsOpcUas and AsOpcUac libraries.
Hi @Lisa0704 , welcome to the B&R Community! I would add that there is an existing B&R Community post that walks through how to set up PLC-to-PLC OPC UA communication, maybe it is useful for you. Here is the link: How to communicate two controllers thought OPC UA
Note: that this is using AS/AR 4.x, which is not the most recent version of Automation Studio and Automation Runtime (AS/AR 6). While the OPC UA Any device portion is similar to AS/AR 6, there are some significant differences in the configuration of the OPC UA server in AS 6 that need to be taken into account.