Specifications

2 Siemens Simatic S7 Driver Online Help
For example, if your process hardware communicates using Industrial Ethernet or
Profibus, you may need to specify the device’s IP address and the specific location
(address) in the device you want to read data from.
Once you configure the driver with this information, it reads the data from the device
and stores it so that your HMI software can access it.
The term I/O Server is sometimes used in place of I/O driver because 7.x drivers
consists of a server and a client. The server does the polling, loading, saving, and
manipulating of driver data.
See Also
Accessing Information | About the SI7 I/O Driver | The SI7 I/O Driver Features |
Overview: Configuring the SI7 Driver
What is a Channel?
A channel is a communication mechanism between your I/O driver and your process
hardware. You define a channel by entering communication settings such as the
network interface card (for an Ethernet driver), the baud rate, parity, stop bits, data
bits, and flow control values (for a serial driver), or vendor-specific information (for
drivers that send data to a third-party API) in your driver configuration program. The
driver uses these settings to determine how to communicate with your process
hardware.
For example, if your process hardware communicates using Profibus, you must select
the communication processor (CP) and the virtual field device (VFD) from your
driver configuration program. If you accidentally select the wrong interface card, the
driver will not communicate with your process hardware.
Intellution drivers allow you to configure multiple channels (paths) to your process
hardware. This feature allows you to set up different communication paths for your
hardware. For example, suppose your SCADA server has multiple network interface
cards. You can configure one channel to use one interface card and the second
channel to communicate through a second card.