Drivers

zenon offers more than 250 different connections to different PLCs and bus systems.

To communicate with a data source it is necessary to link an interface driver (protocol driver). The driver establishes the connection between a PLC and zenon. The data source not necessarily is a PLC. The DDE driver communicates with a DDE server, the OPC client driver with an OPC server, the SNMP driver with SNMP agents, etc.

A number of different drivers is available and they also can be used parallely.

Attention

Under Windows CE only one type of a driver can be started at the time.

On creating a new variable, it has to be defined for which driver the variable is created.

The zenon drivers are protocol drivers. They should not be misunderstood as interface drivers of the operating system (e.g. drivers for LAN cards od drivers for a serial interface). The zenon drivers are always based on the interface drivers of the operating system and communicate with the corresponding protocol (e.g. Modbus RTU, MPI, Melsec A, etc.) that is understandable for the PLC.

Following drivers are available in zenon free of charge: Variables based on these drivers are not counted for licensed I/Os:

Simulator driver	For internally generated variables; can be defined as failure-proof variables (harddisk data) or as flag types; flag objects can automatically change their value for dynamic simulation SIMUL32
Mathematics driver	Variables of this driver are used for the calculation of mathematical functions or for counters. MATHDR32
System driver	variables for monitoring and controlling the hardware, the network and other project-specific properties.
Internal Driver	User-defined variables without connection to a PLC. (Similar to the user-defined variables of the system driver) Sysdrv Each variable has an individual values. So it is not possible e.g. to extract bit or byte variables from an integer variable. Defining address information is not necessary, the according properties in the properties window cannot be edited. Internal

A detailed description of the single drivers can be found in the corresponding driver documentation that also are installed and at the end of the chapter.

On loading a new driver a selection dialog is opened, wher all available drivers are listed. The information for this dialog are in the files Treiber_DE.xml, Treiber_EN.xml etc. depending on the language. You can open resp. edit these XML files with the tool driverinfo.exe.