Posts Tagged troubleshooting communications
Why won’t Pactware work with the Siemens LUT 400?
Posted by danstips in Configuration, Flow, Flowmeters, Level, Level Technology, Siemens, Software, Troubleshooting, Ultrasonic, Ultrasonic Flowmeters, Wireless, WirelessHART on October 22, 2015
Written by: Dan Weise
I’ve used Pactware for a couple years now, so I was surprised when I couldn’t get the Siemens LUT400 to work with the software. The LUT400 ultrasonic level and flow controller comes with a DTM file that I installed before opening the Pactware software.
The DTM file can be downloaded from this link: http://tinyurl.com/cqk2cky
Once it had been installed, I opened Pactware and updated the device catalog, as seen in the picture below:
But when I attempted to establish a HART connection to the LUT400, I got an error message:
Simatic PDM won’t connect to Siemens MultiRanger or HydroRanger
Posted by danstips in Communications, Configuration, Level, Level Technology, Serial, Siemens, SIMATIC PDM, Troubleshooting, Ultrasonic on May 24, 2012
Sometimes I get lazy and don’t follow my own rules. (Rule #1: Test EVERYTHING!) That one oversight cost me three hours when I could have solved a problem in three minutes. Maybe you can learn from my mistake.
The goof happened at a customer site last week. He had a Siemens MultiRanger 100 ultrasonic level transceiver, and was trying to connect to it via Modbus using Siemens SIMATIC PDM software on his Windows XP laptop PC.
Early on, the Lesman salesman who worked with this customer had connected to the MultiRanger from his laptop using PDM, but only one upload worked successfully. The rest failed. The salesman had lent the customer his “known good” serial cable that he’d used for the successful upload.
Siemens tech support had offered the customer several “Try This/Try That” suggestions, but came to the conclusion that a software program on the customers’ laptop had locked up the laptop’s internal serial port so PDM couldn’t access it. The customer’s IT guy ran a port scan program, but could find on application or service running on COM1. Plus, they’d used the serial port successfully for other connections.
I couldn’t do anything more for the customer over the phone, so I grabbed my serial comms toolkit and headed to the site myself.
Lesman Tech Tips 