CIMON Communication Driver

CIMON Communication Driver is intended for data connection between Reliance's runtime software and CIMON control systems through the CIMON PLC Ethernet network.

Communication between the driver and devices is based on the request–response principle. The driver is launched by Reliance's runtime software at visualization project startup.

Supported communication functions

Word Block Read
Word Block Write
Bit Block Read
Bit Block Write

Supported register types

X, Y, M, K, L, F, T, C, S, D, Z, TC, TS, CC, CS

The Reliance system supports reading and writing the following tag types

Bool
Byte
Word
DoubleWord
ShortInt
SmallInt
LongInt
FLoat
String
And arrays of these basic types

Supported Reliance versions

The communication driver is supported in both Reliance 5 and Reliance 4.

CIMON programmable logic controllers

Starting up the driver

The communication driver is a DLL loaded into memory by the Reliance 4 Driver Server program, which can be launched either as a Windows service at Windows startup or as a standard application at the start of a visualization project. Information required to make a connection with devices is read from the visualization project. After reading this information, communication to all connected devices is activated.

Reading/writing data

Data is read periodically or based on a one-shot request of Reliance’s runtime software. When reading periodically, the tag value is updated at a configured interval. One-shot reading is used for tag-controlled data reading. Communication packets are built dynamically according to data quantity requirements. Data writing is based on a one-shot request of the runtime software.