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Issues Getting Modbus Communicating - Very Poor Customer Support

Joe

Hi all,

I am getting very desperate here--I have an upgrade project that I am working on, going from Citect version 7.2 to SCADA 2018. It an HMI that communicates via modbus to a Micronet controller. Prior to this, I had no experience with Citect, and the plan was just to convert the application to the newest version and be done with it. However, after successfully converting, I have not been able to get the HMI to communicate with the controller. We have limited information about how the previous HMI was set up, other than having the application itself to examine.

In addition to this, I have been struggling to get support from Citect, although we have a customer first support number. It turns out that the customer is not permitted to interact directly with tier 2 support, which means getting passed around from person to person without your questions being answered. The tier 2 support has not been responsive, and I have been told this has been escalated as much as it can be. However, the project deadline is approaching and we need to get this working.

I have spent a good deal of time changing around the application ports and boards and devices trying to get what I think should work, but to no avail. I know it is on the Citect app side, because I have a healthy modbus link to the controller using modscan.

I was posting this hoping that someone would be willing to help me out by doing a skype screen share session--it isn't a complicated project, I think there is just something missing with the board/port definition that I'm not getting.

Pretty much completely out of ideas here... If anyone could help it would be much much much appreciated.

Thank you.

Joe

  • Set CITECT.INI modnet parameters.

    set initvar to a valid address on the target device
    set initvarType to correct address type, needed to establish comms
    make sure you have 6 digit addressing e.g. 3000001
    Set Polltime to 0

  • Hopefully you have a copy of the citect.ini file from the old PC. If not, then there may be a recent copy in the project backup, which would now be in the Citect\user\projectname folder. Make sure to copy any modbus-related parameter groups. Depending on which modbus protocol you're using, it could be under [MODBUS], [MODBUSA], [MODNET], etc.

    If you could share the INI settings and screenshots of your board, port, and I/O device definitions (from before you made any changes) we may be able to help. It could help to share the actual scanner.dbf, boards.dbf, ports.dbf, and units.dbf files from your project...sometimes there are extra records in them that should have been deleted which may be causing problems. Please also share any communications error messages you see or a copy of the syslog.ioserver.*.dat file from your Citect\Logs folder.
  • Is it Modbus TCP or Modbus RTU?. Because there are small differences.
  • Hello,

    I deal with Modbus comms using UDP frequently. We communicate using an IP address but we also use a UDP port assignment. This requires using a special option when setting up the port assignment in citect and also setting the ModBus MaxBits parameter in the citect.ini file. We typically use a MaxBits setting of 1888. Let me know if you are using UDP or not and I may be able to help.



    Take care,

    Jim Spence
  • All, thank you for the responses--we were able to find a contractor with Citect experience and he pointed us in the right direction. As I suspected, it was an easy fix. The situation was convoluted because there were a bunch of servers and devices in the project that were apparently left over from another project but not being used, making it very difficult to figure out what was going on.
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