Windows display and IP address change

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1

Hi everybody,

I just started using MAAP5000 display, with windows IOT.

In my mappview application I can change the CPU IP address, for when the customer needs to connect it to his own network. Problem is that if I change the CPU ip address, the display will not be able to connect to it anymore.

So I need, somehow, to let the user change also the network properties of the card inside the display. Considering the knowledge of the average user of this application, I can’t ask him to navigate through the network card properties in window and change the ip address from there, so I would like to know how you managed to do that.

There should be something fool-proof to let the user change the newtork address of the display.

As a last resort I will have to create a script windows-side and run it via mappview, but I was hoping there was something easier since I guess I’m not the only one having this problem.

Thanks

Thanks

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2

Is this a hypervisor system with the PC and PLC running on the same system or are these two separate units?

Stephan

3

they are different units, basically the display is only a viewer.. windows is used only to open a browser which connects to the mappview server on the plc.

4

Then there is no direct way to change the IP from the PLC. You can take a look at this script to execute a script or commands on a remote system from the PLC.

br-automation-community/mappRemoteShell

5

so how users deal with this situation? I guess my customers are not the only ones who need to change the windows ip address..

6

I think in most cases, the customer would just change the IP address in windows. This is typical a one time thing that you either do during commissioning or the customer does it with the help of his IT department.

Stephan

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7

you are very optimistic :joy:

anyway, thank you for your help!

8

Valerio

An option might be that you use an extra IF module in your PLC specifically for the connection to the mappView PC.

Then you only change the IP of the ETH interface to which the customers’ network is connected.

Other option:

Any PLC ethernet interface can function as a DHCP server. So if the ETH interface of the mappView PC is configured as a DHCP client it would receive the ETH address from that server.

Good luck!

Jan

1 Like
9

sorry, I missed your answer. dhcp was my first idea but then I realized customers need to input a specific address, based on their network configurations, so it’s not doable.

thanks for your suggestions!

10

Hi @Valerio_C , I marked answer from Jan as a possible solution, but Im still interested how you have solved your issue in the end, can you update us? :slight_smile:

11

Hi @kovarj ,

it’s still a work in progress, but this is what we are doing:

  • use a software windows side that monitors plc variables via PVI.
  • whenever a specific variable is set to true, this software launches a specific bat that we wrote to change the ip address of the local network card.
  • the bat file changes the ip address of the windows device.

in this way we have almost complete control of windows and we can do things like close kiosk mode, open task manager, etc.

An additional thing to do is to write some code to edit the bat file directly, in order to change the ip address it will change windows to.

An example just to more specific.

  • My plc is 192.168.1.10, windows display is 192.168.1.20 and everything is ok.

  • User changes plc address to 10.20.2.1:

    the plc will open the bat file, edit the ip that the display will need, for example 10.20.2.10, and then save the edited bat.

  • set the trigger variable to true.

  • the software windows side will detect it and run the bat

  • windows display network card address is updated to 10.20.2.1

I hope I was clear