Exporting Visilogic project to other program e.g. Tiaportal? .vlx structure?

[Jevan]

I have a nice project in Visilogic that I have been asked to re-create in Tiaportal/Siemens. I can export each sub-routine to a .vlx. Opening this shows a header of a "Standard Jet DB ", but if you open it with e.g. Access, it doesn't seem to be standard.

Is there any way of converting/exporting the project to another format/structure?

 

(I imagine not, but thought it best to ask)

 

Thanks

[Jevan]

Just to add, if there is a business that offers this possibility, please could you pass on details.

 

Thanks

[Joe Tauser]

I am 99.9% certain that Unitronics proper is not going to make it easy to buy somebody else's product, especially Siemens.

If you're looking for help on this I'd go to one of the general purpose PLC forums and ask.  

Joe T.

 

[John_R]

Well, a few years back I had the (dis)pleasure of dealing with a project that was done with Siemens/TIAPortal.
And it was one of the most unpleasant projects I've had to deal with...
I really don't believe you will have any success trying any kind of direct conversion, but more likely you will spend a lot of time re-writing your "nice" Unitronics code into Siemens-land.

But, I gotta wonder why anyone would want to cross that line into Siemens if you already have a "nice" project in Unitronics??

"Just Saying"...

[Jevan]

On 1/28/2023 at 7:00 AM, John_R said:

But, I gotta wonder why anyone would want to cross that line into Siemens if you already have a "nice" project in Unitronics??

 

Well, the bosses (and maintenance) want to standardise on one brand of PLC for all of the machines in the factory (and sister-factories). Siemens seems to be the industry standard round here, and I and my colleagues know Tiaportal fairly well. We have dumped the project from the Unitronics Jazz PLC (that was originally installed by an external company as part of a package for the whole machine), and are looking into the possibilities.

I have pointed out that it would be much easier to just keep Unitronics for that machine, but I do understand their perspective.

 

Quote

I am 99.9% certain that Unitronics proper is not going to make it easy to buy somebody else's product, especially Siemens.

Understood fully. But while I get it that there is no instant conversion tool, some half-way process of dumping each block, converting it, having to re-write all the inputs but not the ladder etc., would be better than having to re-write it all from scratch. Especially if you have to learn a new way of interpreting the programming from the one you are used to.

 

Thank you for taking the time to respond.

[Fernando Castro]

I don't think that's possible... I mean Unitronics abandoned the project comparison tool for vision series, and there is not even a proper revision control way to deal with Unitronics.

I am rewriting some of my visilogic project to another platform and at least its faster on the other end because I have more tools available. 

Sorry.

I always wondered if at the end it compiles everything to a pseudo structured text code, why it doesn't allow us to work directly on structured text, you could copy and paste and compare programs or work outside of the visilogic environment.

[John_R]

5 hours ago, Fernando Castro said:

I always wondered if at the end it compiles everything to a pseudo structured text code, why it doesn't allow us to work directly on structured text, you could copy and paste and compare programs or work outside of the visilogic environment.

Something I always wondered when I was working with other PLC environments, seems there should be some easy method of cross-platform programming.