Implementation of a Siemens s7-1200 PLC in LabVIEW through Profinet

[Gnuytt1]

In our university lab we currently have a PLC device (Simatic s7-1200) that we want to implement in LabVIEW. We are currently able to use this device by utilizing the Siemens Tia portal v13 software. However, we need to integrate this device in LabVIEW for reasons of flexibility of control system implementation and process visualization. The goal would be to read out sensors from the device, and control device parameters.

The manufacturers of the device assured us that an implementation in LabVIEW should be possible, and have set up the PLC to be usable in LabVIEW via Profinet. They have provided us with some fairly limited documentation explaining the profinet integration with the PLC:

In TIA v13 the device it looks like this:

As you can see, they set up two data blocks (DB1 and 2) for us to utilize in LabVIEW. However, the manufacturer does not have any experience with LabVIEW themselves and consequently say that they cannot help us further with the implementation.

In our lab we have experience in LabVIEW, but no experience implementing PLC devices, or with PLC devices in general. I was wondering if anyone had any advice as to how to integrate this PLC system into LabVIEW using Profinet (feel free to confirm or deny if this is possible without further hardware). 

Concretely, I was wondering if there are any LabVIEW drivers we can download so that we can get the appropriate blocks in LabVIEW to read out and write values from/to the PLC.

Any help or advice would be very welcome.

[santo_13 · Accepted solution]

There are some LabVIEW toolkits available that may be able to help you out,

https://www.ni.com/en-us/shop/product/sp7-toolkit-for-labview.html

https://www.vipm.io/package/hse_lib_s7netcom/

[pincpanter]

You may also consider the Snap7 open source project: https://snap7.sourceforge.net/

I used it for a 1500 CPU and worked well. LabVIEW wrappers are available.

[Gnuytt1]

Thank you both very much for your suggestions. I was having some problems with sp7-toolkit, but s7netcom was fairly easy to get working, even for a PLC newbie as myself. Using s7netcom I managed to implement our system in LabVIEW as we wanted.