Ever needed to know which version of TIA Portal you need to perform an Upload from a PLC and you don’t have the original project?
If you are seeing a message like this one above, then the chances are you are trying to upload a PLC with the wrong version.
In this case, a V17 project is trying to upload (as a new station) a project from a V16 PLC. This cannot be achieved.
But how would you know that the PLC is using TIA Version V16?
Using TIA Portal
You can use TIA Portal to tell you, there’s just 1 drawback:
- You can only read data from the PLC if your version of TIA is the same, or higher than the one that configured the PLC
For example:
| PLC TIA Version | Software TIA Version | Online Diagnostic Capability |
|---|---|---|
| V15.1 | V16 | ✅ |
| V16 | V16 | ✅ |
| V17 | V16 | ❌ |
The best thing to do is to just use your highest version of TIA Portal available.
Here’s what you are going to need to do, first open TIA Portal with no project. You can do it with a project if you want, but it isn’t needed.
In the Project Tree, click the Online Access and expand it
You’ll be shown all of the available interfaces your laptop/PC has to offer. Then chose the interface on which the PLC you want to check is connected to. You’ll then see all of the PLC’s as shown above.
Select the PLC you want to check and expand it.
You’ll see something similar to the above, as if the PLC was part of an offline project. Double click the Online & Diagnostics
If TIA Portal is able to do so, you’ll automatically go “Online” to read the PLC data. As shown above, the Version of the TIA Portal project shows this as V16. Because I’m using V16 for this demo, it’s capable of reading.
If I had chose a PLC that has a V17 project, it would look like this:
Note that no blocks are shown like in the previous example
Note that no details are available as we’ve not been able to go online to the PLC.
Conclusion
If you find yourself in a position where by you don’t have the original offline project, but you need a copy of the software and you don’t know what version of TIA the PLC is… This approach can be used to identify it easily.
Admittedly, TIA does tell you when it fails to perform the upload, but if you have 10 PLCs you need to check that were all installed at different times, you don’t want to go through the pain of trying an upload into a project every time!
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