Recovering TIAPortal Project

[JankyPLC]

Does anyone know if there's a technical reason why Siemens HMIs can't have the program uploaded from them into TIAPortal as a project file, or is this just Germans being unnecessarily stubborn?

Their HMIs are awesome, but lack of this feature is a HUGE miss on an otherwise great product when so many other brands allow this.

If the compiled runtime cant be de-compiled, seems like TIA could ZAP it and load that to the terminal along with the runtime. Memory is cheap enough that can't be the hold up, so what is?

 

[JesperMP]

They used to have the option to store the project on the panel. But this is no longer possible on the latest panels. I don't know the reason to remove this feature, maybe they are indeed stubborn.
But having said the above, I see it the other way. Proper backup regime is an absolute must in any industrial automation project.
Having to resort to uploading from the devices is a bad sign. Just saying.
I also think that the possibility to upload is by some (mis)used as an excuse for having a relaxed attitude to backing up and documenting program changes.
In my everyday work I don't miss the feature to have the project stored on the panel, and I have a lot of projects and customers to maintain, also remotely.

 

[JankyPLC]

We do have a robust repository/backup regime thankfully which alleviates much of this headache, but all it takes is one engineer to forget to save one time after changes and you're SOL.

There's also vendor supplied equipment. Some refuse to supply source projects. Some are out of business. Some we have source projects for, but they may have remoted in or made changes after commissioning and we may not have that project. Some HMIs have recipe data stored on them that's updated regularly. So many scenarios where "just download the last saved file" doesn't solve the problem.

On a side note we recently discovered this fatal flaw in certain versions of AB Compactlogix PLCs where it becomes impossible to Go Online with or Upload from them. There's even a technote about it and the only resolution is, "download a saved .acd to it" which is inexcusable given how many major revisions this bug has existed for, for all the same reasons it doesn't work for HMIs. Off topic, but the tech note I found was from 2022. If anyone knows of a resolution to this since then, please share!

 

[mk42]

The story that I heard about it was:

the feature existed in the old multipanels (called Backport), but it was off by default. IF someone knew to turn it on before they downloaded, it also required external memory (SD card or USB) to store the editable file. Thus, that's 2 big hits against it being used in most scenarios.

When the marketing team designing the comfort panel looked through the features of the old system, instead of looking at that feature and thinking "hey, lets make this more usable" they looked at it and said "oops, no one uses this feature, guess we don't need it"....

Anyway, Siemens products are super duper stubborn about offline projects being king, not online versions. If you ask Siemens employees in the states about it, they just sigh and shake their heads and say "yeah.....", because it's just how business is done here. I bet the average Siemens customer in Europe wishes they could do it too, but surely they aren't THAT stubborn that they'd ignore their home base? I dunno.


It's possible that the reason has something to do with the way you can have several devices in the same Portal project, and there's no way to carve out just the HMI to back it up. That said, they figured out how to do it for the PLC, so surely it's a solvable problem?

 

[JankyPLC]

Anyway, Siemens products are super duper stubborn about offline projects being king, not online versions. If you ask Siemens employees in the states about it, they just sigh and shake their heads and say "yeah.....", because it's just how business is done here. I bet the average Siemens customer in Europe wishes they could do it too, but surely they aren't THAT stubborn that they'd ignore their home base? I dunno.

Every year our Siemens rep asks for feedback/requests to send to Germany. This is always number 1. Every new Rev its the first question and he's got the pleasure of starting his new feature presentation with, no, it doesn't have the only thing you actually want, BUT......."

Also many of our plant personnel wear gloves. Finding out they were going exclusively capacitive touch on the Unified panels killed the buzz for those quick.

 

[mk42]

Every year our Siemens rep asks for feedback/requests to send to Germany. This is always number 1. Every new Rev its the first question and he's got the pleasure of starting his new feature presentation with, no, it doesn't have the only thing you actually want, BUT......."

Also many of our plant personnel wear gloves. Finding out they were going exclusively capacitive touch on the Unified panels killed the buzz for those quick.

Did you test it with your gloves? Supposedly the new generation capacitive screens work with gloves a lot better than the old ones did.

snippet from the manual:

Note when operating the capacitive multi-touch screen:
• Surface contact with a diameter of about 5 to 20 mm is required for an operator action to
be detected.
• An operation with gloves with a material thickness of < 2 mm is detected in most cases.
However, check the usefulness of the gloves you are using.
• To avoid incorrect operation, certain inputs are ignored and blocked from further entry:
– Simultaneous operation with more than 5 fingers.
– Surface contact with a diameter of > 3 cm, for example, resting the palm of the hand
on the touch screen
– As soon as the touch screen is no longer touched, input is possible again.