Communicating between 1722 smart camera and TwinCAT PLC

[picka612]

Hello,

I'm trying to get a Beckhoff CX9000 to trigger and receive pass/fail messages from a 1722 smart camera over Ethernet. I'm not too sure what would be the best way to go about this. Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks

[Jochen]

I don't know the features of the Beckhoff CX9000, but in general I could think of several options for the communication:

1. Modbus: I think Beckhoff provides a Modbus RTU library for TwinCAT. The same protocol can be used with your smartcam
2. TCP/IP: The 1722 can run low level TCP/IP communication. If this is also supporte by the CX9000 this would be another option.
3. OPC: You could run the TwinCAT OPC server on a Windows PC and deploy a LabVIEW project on the same PC, that accesses the OPC items. Then you could use any communication method provided by LabVIEW (e. g. Shared Variables) to communicate to your smartcam. In this scenario a Windows PC is required to act as a gateway.

I hope that helps,

Jochen Klier

National Instruments

[picka612]

Hi thanks for the reply.

The CX9000 does have a TCP/IP library that I am just getting into. As for the 1722 side of things, how exactly is the TCP/IP communication set up? I have never worked with these cameras before.

Thanks again.

[Jochen]

The 1722 can be programmed with LabVIEW. As a first step you can use the standard TCP/IP examples, that ship with LabVIEW.

Jochen