Does PNPSCADA support Schneider Meters

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sdg.marinusvz
2013-05-16 17:32

*** UPDATE: Yes, we do, and we also optimized the comms for GPRS so that it is now also practical. You can put a modem directly on the RS485 network, so you don't even need a TCP/485 converter (provided there are no other masters on the 485 network to confuse the comms) ***
Can your system work with Schneider meters?
We've had a few requests from building that are already on AMR with Schneider meters and they want to know whether we can take over the management thereof.
I'm going for a meeting with the guys shortly and I want to be ready for the meeting.

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sdg.marinusvz
2019-01-23 13:55

Are you going to put down a PNPSCADA server at these sites?
Reason I'm asking: usually the guys from Schneider wants you to receive the data from their own on site server. (e.g. from a Microsoft SQL Database or something like that)
The real reason for that is that to read profile remotely for the Schneider meter is very inefficient. The profile is generally kept at 15 minute intervals, and to read every interval is a separate Modbus transaction. On a local network this can be nice and fast, since those Modbus messages can fly very quickly, you can easily get hundreds through per second, but if you have a ping time of 1.5 seconds on GPRS from a remote server, for example, it means that reading one day of data from one meter will take you 96x1.5s = 144s (2 and a quarter minute?). So, if we assume you have 200 meters on an RS485 network, which means you can only read one meter at a time, and if you have to download a month's worth of data (lets say 30 days); then it will take you 200x30x96x1.5s = 864000seconds, which is 240 hours, or 10 days!! (more than a week).
So, they will give you fancy reasons why you should use their server, which they might even believe themselves, and you will really struggle to get the protocol/register mappings from them to do this reading (I found by chance it uses the same protocol that is used to download a profile from a Schneider relay on the internet); but in the last analysis, the real reason why this expensive Schneider meter is such a bad meter for remote meter reading, is the above reason, that it just simply performs too terribly, if your transaction turnaround time is not extremely fast. The Schneider meters was never designed to be read remotely.
So, we've done the most difficult part of the work to integrate this protocol to PNPSCADA, but we haven't had a customer yet that wanted to read it directly, because of above reason.
I know we've got another Reseller with an agreement with Schneider to send through a CSV file automatically periodically, with the data. We can then upload that data into PNPSCADA, in case you're interested. At the end of the day that would probably perform better. Except if you want to put down a PNPSCADA server physically on site, in which case we can put the Schneider code in place, and you can read the meters directly.
I will advise, however, that you only do this if Schneider doesn't already have a master on that RS485 network that keeps it very busy (we can, of course, go through a Modbus TCP gateway, which can synchronize multiple masters over the same Modbus RTU medium, but the point is that the medium might already be very busy, because of Schneider's inefficient profile protocol)


Tags: modbus
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sdg.marinusvz
2015-09-15 15:22

Schneider is now supported

This has now been implemented and is supported by PNPSCADA.
We have also been able to put in a 10x optimization on the profile readout, so remote meter reading on a high density site with a lot of this meter on one RS485 network is now more viable than before.
For more details, see:
http://wiki.pnpscada.com/showthread.php?425-Schneider-PM3255-support

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