Shawn takes a look at the ET 200SP line of Distributed I/O from Siemens in Episode 19 of The Automation Show, Season 2.

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The Automation Show, Season 2 Episode 19 Show Notes: The links mentioned in the video are listed below:

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  ET 200SP Website

  
  


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  ET 200SP Manual Collection

  
  


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  Shawn’s Siemens S7 Course

  
  

Programming Note: Due to scheduling conflicts, episodes 17 & 18 and releasing after episodes 19-2x :-O

Read the transcript on The Automation Blog: (automatically generated)

Shawn Tierney (Host):

Hey everybody. Welcome back to the show. My name is Shawn Tierney from Insights and Automation. And today, we’re talking e t 200 s p distributed IO from Siemens. Before we go any farther, I do wanna thank Siemens for sending in the samples and for sponsoring this episode so it will be ad free, and that’s as far as it goes.

Everything else is my own opinion and thoughts. And, although I do appreciate them making this ad free and sending in the samples because I wanna be able to show them to you if I didn’t have them. And, this is one of the reasons I’m doing this is I just put these hands on demos together for my students who come out to the automation school for hands on training. So I wanted to have something they could bring to their station and program with an s seven twelve hundred or 1,500. And, so I’m creating a bunch of these, and you’ll see more and more of these as the weeks go on.

But in any case, I we previously covered a couple on IFM, but now I’m doing the e t 200 s p. So we’ll take a closer look at the hardware in a little bit. But But before we get into the hardware, I did wanna run through some slides that do a great job of explaining what e t 200 s p I o is. And, again, I call it distributed IO, not remote IO because here in America, most of us know there is a remote IO product from Rockwell Automation that is trademarked, Rockwell. So we don’t wanna confuse people by using the term remote IO when possible.

So let’s go ahead and go to the slide deck now. And, the first slide is and, again, these this is a slightly of a couple three year old slide deck from Siemens that we’re gonna be going through. And, you know, the first thing is, hey. E t 200 s p and e t 200 m p I o or I p 20 in cabinet I o. They’re not on machine or machine mount IO.

And, of course, the e t 200 MP is the full size IO that’s about the same size as the 1,500, whereas the SP is the smaller. They’re like the slice IO you see from all the different vendors. A matter of fact, a couple of big vendors are coming out with new IO this fall or have already come out with it, and we’ll be covering those as well in the coming weeks. But today, we’re focusing on e t 200 s p. And so I wanted to, talk about, you know, this is a marketing slide that Siemens puts in their presentations, and it makes sense.

All the vendors wanna have IO for all the different applications, and Siemens is no different. And, actually, they got some stuff that other vendors don’t have. But I’m gonna go right beyond this one and jump right into, you know, the main selling points of this product line where it’s compact, it’s fast, it’s any of NG efficient, it’s easy to wire, and I can attest to that having done three, four hundred wires here. It was very easy to wire. I really liked it.

They say it has a great environmental coverage. There actually is, some extreme modules. We’ll talk about that towards the end. And then built in diagnostics. Again, depending if you buy the high function and standard or basic modules, right, will depend on what kinda diagnostics you get.

In any case, here is what it looks like now. The coloring of this slide, I think that the pictures colors the gray is a little lighter, almost it’s almost like a light green. It’s darker in person as we saw. Let me switch over here. As you can see here.

So, I don’t know what’s going on with that, but one of the things you do see on this slide is, one of the first things you’ll notice is a fail safe module, so safety modules. So, yes, you can mix standard and fail safe modules in the same rack or same lineup. The other thing you’ll notice is it’s compact like most of the Slice I o that’s out there. Energy efficient ruggedness, there is an extreme version of this available. Intelligent, you can get high functionality modules.

Right? Push in terminals, which I really liked, very easy to use, tool free connections. Of course, if you’d put a wire in the wrong place, which happened to me once or twice out of 400 wires, you can use a screwdriver and get it out really quick, and then, reduced parts of variance. So that’s their marketing on this product line, but I also wanna call attention all the different ways you can actually mark up the products. You can put labels in the front, right in the front of the module itself.

You can put labels on top and on the back as well. So a lot of different labeling options is also a color coding you can put over the terminals as well. We’ll see that a little bit later. In any case, this is the physically how it goes together. So first of all, it doesn’t you they don’t all just slide together like tongue and groove.

You do have to put them on the DIN rail and slide them into each other from right to left. So keep that in mind. Okay. And we always start the leftmost part is what we call an interface module. And so think of that if you’re a Rockwell guy, that’s your adapter.

Okay? Now the interface module, most of these take a bus adapter. In other words, you can choose copper or you can choose fiber, or you can choose copper and fiber. And I love this design because, well, I’m sure it adds a little cost to the product. Being able to swap out copper for fiber if you need to or do one copper one fiber if you need to, I think it’s a great idea.

That kind of flexibility is great. Now there is a low cost interface module that has that bus adapter built in, but in any case, most of them, as you’ll see, what was what I’ll show you here on the workbench, it’s module. You choose the one you want and this basic and advanced and we’ll take a look at all those. Then you have the bases and the IO modules and we’ll look at this in real time here on the workbench in a moment, but you can see here the basis of what the IO modules plug into. If you look there on the the fourth item there, it’s just a base module without the IO.

And, that’s what clips onto the DIN rail and slides together, and then we stick our IO modules in. Also, share the keying. A lot of people leave that out, but I think it’s pretty cool what they do there. And at the very end, they have something called a server module. The name for this, I’m thinking of servers like a computer server.

So I don’t know what happened with the translation there, but it’s like an end cap. If you’re a Rockwell person, it’s like an end cap. You gotta have that at the end. It doesn’t really serve up anything, but, in any case, you gotta have it. So in any case, then you can see kinda how it’s laid out there.

Let’s go ahead and go to the next slide here. And, these are all the different type of interface modules they have. So the very basic one, right, if you needed a low cost drop of IO, it only does up to 12 modules, but, you know, it’s an all in one unit with two Ethernet ports built in, and you can use all the modules with it except for safety modules. K. So that’s important to know.

Then we have the standard interface modules, which do up to 32 modules. Right? You can use safety with them. You can actually expand them to e t 200 a l if you needed to have some, on machine products or machine mount I o. I’ll show you the a l in a future video.

We’re gonna cover that separately. And you can hot swap any single module at a time, which is very cool. And then, of course, if we go to the high featured, we get up to 64 modules. You can multi hot swap, multiple modules. You can actually set it for asynchronous mode so you can get the speeds up to two hundred fifty microseconds.

So it’s, very cool there. And you can see the other options there including the CPU, which we will cover. That’ll probably be next week, though. Alright. So, one of the cool features they have is this was new at the time of this, you know, two, three years ago of this presentation is they added a, a unit that actually could use three Ethernet ports.

So why would you do that? Well, think of it. Right? You maybe you’re daisy chaining from one interface module to the next and you have a station where you either need a bulkhead connector so you can program from or you have an HMI. You need that third connection.

Right? And so this allows you to have three connections. Now the downside of this is you actually have four connections, but you can only use three and I’ll show you what I mean here. Let’s go back to the overhead, and I actually have that module right here. Thank you, Siemens, for sending him in.

And you can see I have my two bus adapters, but I can