Siemens TIA Portal V17 – Firmware ≥2.9 & WinCC 7.5 SP2 – No Communication

Hi everyone,

This is an informal post detailing some issues that I experienced yesterday with TIA Portal V17 and an S7-1515 PLC running firmware V2.9.

I’d updated WinCC 7.5 SP2 to WinCC 7.5 SP2 UPD9 and experienced a whole host of issues from the get-go.

This post helps people going through the same thing to save valuable time (took me way to long to get this going!)

🔎What’s In This Post?

⬆️What’s Changed?

Communication has changed in PLC firmware version 2.9 for S7-1500 PLCs. Now they require certificated access. In WinCC 7.5 SP2 Update 4, Siemens introduced this as a WinCC requirement too. So now you need a certificate between PLC and WinCC. This seems to be the case even if your security features are set to None, the below process still needs to be followed

😡Problems Faced

If you try and setup communication between WinCC 7.5 SP2 UPD4+ and an S7-1500 running firmware V2.9+, no communication will be established unless the certification from the PLC has been “adopted” by WinCC.

You’ll be able to ping the PLC, diagnose that the Field PG/PC setup is correct, but WinCC will never connect.

✅Resolution

Here’s what I did to resolve this:

• Download the SIMATIC SCADA Export V17 Tool from Siemens
  • Download Here >>> https://support.industry.siemens.com/cs/document/109748955/simatic-scada-export-for-tia-portal?dti=0&lc=en-US
    
• Follow the guide for usage here >>> https://support.industry.siemens.com/cs/document/109805946/why-is-it-not-possible-to-establish-a-connection-to-a-plc-s7-1500-v2-9-s7-1200-v4-5-with-wincc-runtime-v7-?dti=0&lc=en-US

🔹A few more pointers

1. You must use the Simatic SCADA Export tool if you want to load certificates into WinCC 7.5
2. The PLC must be downloaded with the hardware if you’ve made changes to the security, else the certificate won’t match
3. The PLC must be compiled before the export (and be error free)

A few other learning points that I picked up whilst battling with this were:

• When importing the AS file (Right click on PLC connection in PLC and choose AS > Load from file), the scope of file extension will be hiding the .zip extension. Change this to TIA Portal Export.zip using the drop down
• When upgrading from Pre UPD4 to Post UPD4, text-list functionality breaks if an earlier WinCC version loads a PDL containing one. This can corrupt the PDL, so ensure you do not load WinCC UPD4+ in an earlier version