Siemens HMI to Red Lion Conversion

The customer requested a Siemens HMI to Red Lion Conversion. The machine had an older Tiromat machine with a Siemens OP5.  The OP5 communication to the S7 PLC was failing intermittently, to the point it was inoperable – thus the reason for the Siemens HMI to Red Lion conversion  They did not have the Protool project for the OP5, neither a documented program for the S7 PLC.  They only had a wiring diagram and a partial operator’s manual for the thermoforming machine.

So the project involved some reverse-engineering to re-create the buttons, recipes, alarms and displays from the OP5 to the Graphite G07 HMI with MPI Adapter.  It also required some PLC program modifications to add the Red Lion buttons, since the OP5 had some hard-wired buttons on it.  Some STL code was also cleaned up to be represented in LAD, as well as unused code was removed.

The customer was very happy with the result, since they were unable to operate the machine normally with the communication failures.  The next phase will involve upgrading the CPU314 IFM which is using the integrated positioning function, to a S7-1511C CPU with integrated motion control.