Wireless PLC Access: Connecting to a PLC with a Travel Router, and When Not To

How's it going, everyone? Welcome back to the channel. In this video, we're going to be answering a question that was asked on the YouTube channel for Joltek a couple of weeks ago, and I promised that gentleman I would make a video, as it is a topic that I wanted to cover for a while now. And so we're going to be talking about connecting wirelessly to your control systems, more specifically to PLCs.

We're going to talk about why it is a problem. I'm going to be sharing some experience from my past from systems integration and commissioning equipment, explaining where this may come in handy. So for those of you who are new in the field, there's going to be a lot of different tips that you want to pay attention to.

We're going to talk about different trade offs and different parameters when connecting to PLCs, and then we're going to finish off talking about a different approach that may be suitable, again, in very specific applications where you may want to allow more people connecting remotely, depending of course on your site, depending on your IT and OT best practices.

But without any further delay, let's get started.

So if you have been in our industry for long enough, you will know that there's going to be a lot of different protocols when it comes to communication, and that relates to communication to different field devices, to the controllers. It could be communication from the PLCs to HMIs. It could be from PLCs to SCADA.

In this video, we're talking about communicating with the PLC for the purposes of programming and troubleshooting your equipment. So as you probably also know, most controllers, and I say most because I've actually seen an example where it is not the case, but most controllers do not have a wireless connection out of the box.

So this is an example of a Rockwell Automation or an Allen-Bradley CompactLogix PLC, and what you will notice is that there's going to be two ports on the bottom and one port on the faceplate. And so these are going to be your Ethernet connections. We've talked about them on the channel. You set the IP address of the machine.

You set the IP address of the controller. You can go online with the controller. And on the front plate, you have the USB connection. You will commonly see this in printer applications, but you can plug in via USB from your machine to the controller and be able to go online via RSLinx once again.

And similarly, we have the option on the Siemens side. So we have the S7-1200 generation two series right here. We have the S7-1500 series down on the middle shelf. And of course, we also have an example of the Productivity PLC from AutomationDirect. And none of those controllers are able to communicate wirelessly.

There's going to be many examples. Again, Phoenix Contact, if you take your Opto 22s. In almost all instances, PLCs will not natively connect wirelessly to your laptop or to your other programming machine, whatever that may be. And so what typically engineers in our field do is they will carry a travel router.

So this is an example of the TP-Link Nano series that I have purchased, I believe almost eight years or so ago. I don't think they sell this line anymore. I think there's a new flavor of these types of routers. They will be very similar in terms of setup. There's going to be a couple of trade offs that you want to pay attention to when you purchase these, and we'll get into those in a couple of moments.

But this allows you to remotely connect to the PLC, or any device for that matter. If you want to go online with your VFDs, you can. If you want to go online and back up maybe some other devices, load cells, anything that talks on that specific network, you can. And of course, the other alternative is going to be to have one of these consumer based, if you will, switches or routers as we can see here.

It is a Wi-Fi router, dual band. You will notice again from TP-Link. There are other options available. TP-Link is not the only manufacturer of this type of hardware. I want to get in as to why it is needed, so we understand the PLCs don't have this option. Until I had very specific requirements in the field, I did not necessarily understand or have the need or have the problem that I have experienced further in my career.

So as you transition perhaps from working at a plant that has some connectivity, in certain cases you don't, but ultimately you will have assets that are typically going to contain an electrical panel with the PLC. And so in almost all cases, when there is a problem, you will need to come down, you will need to set up your laptop on a conveyor belt, on a bucket.

There's going to be a lot of, I would say, different variations of how you're going to deploy, but you're then going to bring a roll of the Ethernet cable or sometimes the USB cable, again, depending on what you're connecting to. It could also be the translator from, let's say, USB to RS-232 or RS-485, plug into your PLC, get the program, or again, if you have it already on your laptop, go online with the PLC, troubleshoot, make changes, so on and so forth.

So that's use case number one if you're inside of a facility that has not been networked. In my instance, and I've experienced this a number of years ago, I was sent to commission equipment for this peanut butter facility, and what had happened was the electrician that was promised to help me FAT, and that means validate the equipment, check out all of the I/O, validate that all the safeties are coming up.

The electrician ended up getting pulled off the project because of course the operations are going to be taking priority over any engineering type of work. So what I needed to do at that instance before another engineer was sent to the site is make progress on the I/O side. And as you can imagine, if you're plugged in via an Ethernet cable, regardless of the length, it's not always obvious to bring your entire workstation together with you in certain environments.

And it's usually fine if you have a small contained machine, if you're working on a case backer, if you're maybe working on a palletizer, or if you're sitting maybe next to a production line where someone can go and check the I/O. But in that specific instance, I remember this very well because I had to climb forty foot tall tanks, this vertical ladder, but I had to bring both my laptop but also to make sure that the connection was established, and that is when I started looking into other applications.

And so just to illustrate the environment, so the PLC panel for this specific machine and piece of equipment was being commissioned, it was not connected to the plant network yet. The IT department has not assigned IP addresses. Again, there's a lot of discussions as to why things could happen in a different way or potentially could happen in a better way in this specific instance, but the requirement was to continue checking out I/O, some of which was residing in fairly remote locations.

And this is true in many industries, whether you're working in oil and gas, if you're working in food and bev, if you're working in chemical industries, you will often find that the electrical panel is going to be quite far from your I/O. So what you can do, or one of the options that you have, is to install one of these wireless devices, again, this is just one example, next to a PLC, and we will have the full technical demo on how to do it, but you can then wirelessly connect to that network and go online with the PLC.

Of course, the right approach, if you have the full facility, if you have the support of your IT staff, we can then start talking about the OT/IT architecture, how you can properly set up servers, how you can properly set up jump boxes. This is to allow you to complete your initial tasks and some of the tasks that may not have IT support in a much better fashion.

So let's talk about the constraints. I've mentioned this a little bit in the past. Maybe you have seen the size and the difference. We'll unbox the outer router in just a few moments. But number one constraint is size. So when we're talking about traveling to work on some of these projects, it is simply impractical to be bringing these routers on the plane with you in your backpack.

You already are carrying multiple tools. So that's the reason why you're working with some of these smaller form factor devices. The second question is, of course, the price. And you can talk about routers being, I believe this one I had purchased for maybe thirty dollars at the time. The newer model is probably fifty or sixty dollars.

You can go all the way up to hundreds of dollars or even thousands of dollars if you're talking about enterprise equipment. So of course, you will be in environments that are not as nice as inside of your home. So you want to sometimes use cheaper alternatives that get the job done as opposed to investing in very expensive hardware that will be ruined by the environment that you are in.

So it's very easy to replace one of these routers should it fail. It's a relatively low cost. The next item is the range, so as you can imagine, with any wireless electronics, and as we have seen on the image here, you will have the range that is listed on the box. And it's not only range, it's also speed, so when you start having multiple people connecting to, let's say, the small router, when you're starting to be a little bit further away, you may need something that carries multiple antennas, as you can see on the packaging, which may be the requirement for specific sites, depending again on the industry.

If you're going to be working in a fairly large facility and whatever you're commissioning has a panel further along the production line, maybe you want to invest a little bit more to extend the range of the wireless solution.

All right, so we're going to be demoing this on an Allen-Bradley CompactLogix PLC, different from the one that I have shown you just a couple of minutes ago. But the principle is the exact same. We have one USB port, and we have two Ethernet ports on the bottom. We have the first router that we're going to configure, and what I wanted to do is, before we obviously get into what's already configured, I'm going to factory reset the device.

So what I have here is one of those phone pins that you can typically eject your SIM or SD card with. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to press it in until we get a click, and then we're going to hold until the device factory resets. And once again, this is going to be in the manual, so I recommend that you follow what is written there if you have purchased maybe a secondhand device or if you simply have lost the password.

So you'll notice it will stop blinking after we have been pressing for a few moments. And at that point, what we can do is we can unplug the power cable, which is just a USB mini, and we can plug that back in. Let's see if everything comes back online. You'll see it will probably take a couple of moments to boot up, but ultimately, we can now find this network on our laptop in which we're going to look at in just a couple of moments.

But we're going to place it next to the PLC. And what I'm going to do here is, again, exactly what you will find in the electrical panel, is I'm going to connect this extremely short, this is not even a foot long Ethernet cable, from this port on the router that we have to the appropriate port of the PLC.

And of course, for the purposes of the demo, it doesn't necessarily matter where we're going to connect to. We can connect to port one or port two. However, first and foremost, on these PLCs, the upper one, I guess looking at it this way, is going to be port one. The down one is going to be port two. In this case, A1, as you'll see here, 192.168.0.231, is where I am going to connect.

That IP address is extremely important because it's how we're going to configure our software, be able to ping the device. So that is pretty much all the hardware configuration we need. We have 110 coming in into the power supply, powering the PLC. Usually, you'll find that inside of the panel. And then we have a five volts, again, from a standard USB plug for this specific router, and then the Ethernet cable is connected between the two into the port that we have a known IP address on.

Hi, my name is Vladimir Romanov. I am the founder of Joltek as well as SolisPLC. With a background in electrical engineering and an MBA, and over a decade of experience leading projects in manufacturing and industrial automation, I help engineers, managers, and manufacturers make smarter technical and business decisions, modernize their operations, and build stronger careers.

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All right, so we are on the laptop. I have a smaller screen size because I'm remoting into it. So what I can do here is I can press on the network icon that many of you should already be familiar with. And what we will find is the identifier for the specific device, which is listed on the back of that specific router.

So what I'm going to do here is I'm going to connect to TP-Link. I'm going to uncheck Connect automatically, press on Connect. The other thing that we do need to handle is if we open Control Panel, so Control Panel, it is possible, because, again, I have played with some of the settings on this machine, what we'll need to do is change it back to DHCP.

Otherwise, we will not be able to connect to our specific device. So I'm going to go into Network and Sharing Center. You'll see that we have a couple of different networks. I have the SolisPLC one, which is the wired connection, and then I have the TP-Link, which we have just wirelessly connected to.

I'm going to go into Adapter Settings. In this case, once again, I want to focus on the wireless connection. I'm going to pull that up. I can go into Properties. Here I'm going to select, let's see here, IP version four. Everything is automatic. That is perfectly fine. What I can now do is if I go inside of my command prompt, I can type in here, let's see, IP config, and we should be able to find if we scroll down, the wireless adapter should give us an IP address of 192.168.0.100.

So if we go to the dot one IP address, I believe that we should be able to access this specific device. Let me just double-check. The problem that I have is that I have two TP-Link devices, so they should both have the same DNS name. So 192.168.0.1. Let's see here.

There we go. And so you will notice that this is not the right device because it is the tri band Wi-Fi 6E router. This is my main wireless home router. Let's go back into this so we can double-check here.

Let's see here. And I have a ton of different, of course, IP addresses and configs. Let's see once again. So IP config, because that should be different from the other router. So the IP address for wireless LAN, let's double-check the command prompt.

Okay, so it looks like it applied this time. Let's see here.

All right. So I figured out a path forward. As you can see by the top banner, we are connected to the TP-Link Wireless N Nano Router WR802N, and that's the same model number. We have a login screen, and so here, if I put in the username, default is admin, and password is admin, I can log in, and what I should be presented...

Again, there's going to be... Obviously, it is not a secure username and password. I will be presented with a prompt that allows me to set up the device. And here I'm just going to zoom out a little bit. But in this case, what I'm going to choose is, of course, I'd like to configure the device, so I'm going to select Next.

I'm going to change the login username and password, so that was admin and admin, and I'm going to select something different. So that's going to be Joltek, and I'm going to select a different password. Again, in most of these use cases, it doesn't need to be extremely complicated, but someone could access your wireless network if left unchecked. So I'm going to press on Next. It's going to give me a warning once again. So there's going to be different modes, and I would encourage you to look in the data sheet what they actually mean. The easiest one by far to set up is an access point, which I have used many different times.

We'll take a look at that configuration. That being said, you can obviously, like I said, look in the manual, figure out what works best for you for different use cases. I'm going to press on Next. Wireless network name. Again, we can change this, so I'm going to name this as my Joltek Network 001.

We have the wireless password. Again, I believe that we should be saving this. We can change it, of course, to something different. Just going to type that out on the side.

And I'm going to press on Next. We have the LAN type, smart IP, that's fine. IP address, this is of the specific device. We're going to press on Next, and we should be able to finish. I don't think there's anything else we need to be setting up. It's going to reboot the router for just a moment, and then we can proceed with the check if we're able to, first and foremost.

So the first check that I always like to do is, of course, we can ping the actual device that is the PLC. And then check number two is if we're able to go online with our PLC, and we'll see that in just a moment.

So we will get an error page, and that is because we have changed the network of the router. I don't believe that we are connected anymore. So what I will do is I'm going to press on the dropdown. You will see that among the other networks currently inside of my residence, we will find the Joltek N 001.

I'm going to select the network, connect automatically, press on Connect, and this is where the password that we had just been shown is going to be displayed. I'm going to enter the password. Let's see here. Press on Next. And if everything is correctly set up, we should be able to... In this case, I believe it was DHCP that we've set.

Let's take a look at if we are able to connect to the device. Let's see here. There we go. So we have a different login. Again, I changed it on purpose, so I'm going to change the credentials as well. Press on Login. Again, this is a warning from Google Chrome. It doesn't like the fact that I'm using a very loose password.

That is perfectly fine. It is not a problem for this specific application. We have an IP address of 192.168.0.1, as we can see also in the search bar. So now what I can do is I've accessed PLCs over the virtual machine.

So now what I can do is inside of the virtual machine, I will once again open up command prompt, and if I'm not mistaken, we had 192.168.0.235 or 231. Let's see here. We're going to cancel out of this, 231. Doesn't seem like we're able to ping the device. Oh, there we go. So we are getting some answers. What I do want to set up is, of course, RSLinx.

So let's open up RSLinx Classic. Once we have this open, we can browse the subnet. I'm going to assume that none of you have the specific driver set up. So what I can do here is go into Communications, Configure Drivers. There's going to be two options when it comes to Ethernet/IP and Ethernet based devices. So if we select the first one, you will notice that first and foremost, I can press on Okay.

But I will need to specify the IP address of my device. So here, what I can do is I can type in the IP address of the PLC. So that's going to be 192.168.0.231.

I'm going to press on Okay. What I'm also going to showcase is if I add this Ethernet/IP driver, Add new Ethernet/IP, I will browse a remote subnet. Again, this is the challenge of a virtual machine, but 192.168.0.1, which is where the dongle or the router is set up, 255.255.255.0. Again, browse remote subnet on the Ethernet/IP driver.

I'm going to press on Apply, press on Okay. We now have both, so if I go into AB Ethernet, Eth1, this is the first driver that I've configured. Hopefully, it picks up on the specific PLC. And you'll notice in a moment it will be unrecognized, and it should hopefully bring in.

I typed in the IP address wrong. So here if we go again, configure, drivers. It is not .1, it is .0.231. .0.231. And let's double-check the other driver just in case. .0.1, exactly. It's just a miss on my side, so I'm going to navigate away, navigate back, auto browse, and hopefully it should show the zero. There we go.

So 0.231, we have the CompactLogix. It is not connected to anything else outside of the wireless node. And similarly, if we go to AB Ethernet/IP, it should be able to browse the remote subnet. Again, it takes a moment to figure out all of the devices.

All right, so it looks like for whatever reason, the second driver is not letting me auto browse to that specific PLC. The first approach has worked, so there's no issues accessing the 192.168.0.231 IP address through the router. If I go into my module configuration, I can obviously find the port configurations as well.

We can assign different IP addresses to port A1, to port A2 without any problems. I am not sure why. In the past, I've had a lot of success, again, with different hardware. We'll talk about the second router in just a moment. It should be able to browse that remote subnet, which is 192.168.0, but for whatever reason, it is not picking up the specific device.

We can troubleshoot. I'm sure we can get it working, but ultimately, it should be able to scan the entire subnet that is connected to your router. But if you do not have that possibility for whatever reason, if you configure your drivers, if you go back to the first approach that we've done, you can add the IP addresses of any other devices, be able to go online with them, be able to retrieve data, and connect to them as you would normally expect over a wired connection, but of course, in this case, wirelessly.

All right, so we're going to set this contraption to the side. We're going to briefly talk about the other TP-Link router that we have. It is the AC1200 series Wi-Fi router. So again, this is only to demonstrate that you can have longer range solutions. You don't necessarily need to travel with the Nano router.

And so this router is just a commercially available one, you can purchase this on Amazon. So we're going to go ahead and cut into the plastic on the side. We're going to open this up. Again, nothing overly difficult if you ever set up your home network. What you will normally find is a couple of items inside of this box, so I'm expecting the usual corrugated cardboard where everything is going to be. As I've mentioned before, this is probably a bit more bulky to travel with, so this is the Nano router versus the large size. So this is typically used for home networks. We're going to remove some of the plastics. Of course, we have the antenna, as we would expect.

We can place that on our desk. The process for setting up one of these is going to be very similar. So you will have a 110 outlet. Again, if you're going inside of panels, hopefully you have a connection. If not, you need to run that cable. We get a spare RJ45 cable. We're not going to need this. We also will not be actually routing from an ISP or an Internet service provider.

I've talked about this in other videos, but all we need to do in terms of setting up the hardware is the following.

So I'm going to unplug the cable from the Nano router. I'm going to land this in one of the orange ports. So once again, if you're using an internet service provider, which you shouldn't be for this specific use case, you need to land that in the blue port. We then also need to power on, so I'm going to connect the power adapter.

I'm going to, for a moment, place the Nano router on my tabletop, and I'm going to plug this in, and we're going to go through the similar steps of setting up this specific TP-Link so that we could go online with the PLC. And just as a notice, it is still connected to the exact same port, so in theory, nothing should have changed from an IP address, from a networking standpoint, and we should have an apples to apples comparison of what it takes to set one of these up as opposed to the Nano router.

So the 110 is in place. We should hopefully... Let's see here. We have a power button right there. We should have some blinking lights appear on the faceplate of the router. Let's see one more time. Maybe the power adapter is not seated correctly. Let's try that again.

And there you have it. It looks like we got some boot up faults or it just had to wait for a moment. We have all the signals coming up. It probably flashed with the fact that I'm not connected to a normal internet based connection, which is what these commercially available routers are expecting. But once again, it takes a little bit of time to boot.

We should be able to get online with the network. Let's take a look at the settings and start from there.

All right, so just as we have done in the past, you will notice that the first step is going to be connecting to the actual TP-Link. And in this case, we have two networks out of the box. So I'm going to select the TP-Link 347E. You'll notice that it is a different adapter name, so we have changed hardware, and of course, the identifier for the network is going to be different.

I would assume that the same password is going to be the default. That is not the case.

So I had to grab a picture of the bottom label of the router where the password is located. So again, the wireless network name is matching what is written underneath. I'm going to type in the password. So let's see here. That should be perfect, and we should be able to connect. I do want to double-check inside of my control panel.

So let's see here.

The IP address should be again DHCP based, so it should give us an IP address.

So what we can do is type in 192.168.0.1, and if everything is successful, we should be brought to the interface. You'll notice that there's going to be a different label. So this is the third label that you see in this video. It's the third device that I have when it comes to TP-Link.

But in this case, I'm going to type in a password. So let's see here.

Let's get started. And we should be able to connect, so we are wirelessly connected to the router or switch. It's going to detect our time. Internet port disconnected. This is not something we're looking to do for our application. We can have both networks. Again, this really depends on what you're looking for to accomplish with the specific device.

We can leave it on default. Keep your router updated. Again, it's not connected to the internet, so it's probably not going to get the updates anyways, unless we explicitly go in and make that happen. I'm going to press on Next. And here you'll notice that the interface is a little bit better and a bit more explicit and will tell us what's going on with the different devices.

What you will notice is that as we would expect, we can still browse to that same PLC. Just as a test, if I right-click and if I go into module configuration, once again, we're able to see the device. That being said, the true test, so right now you can probably tell that we are only connected via a single cable from that router, and we are wirelessly connected to that router.

We need to be able to go online with the PLC. So let's launch Studio 5000 and see if we can connect and get the software off the PLC.

So I've already done a couple of things with this specific PLC. I have a couple of projects already enabled. What I would like to do is open the project from an upload, because this will determine that we can in fact get to the PLC, we have set up the drivers correctly, and we're able to pull all of the information from the specific project into our machine that is wirelessly connected.

What you will notice here is that we have FactoryTalk Linx. We can switch to Classic. We can create a new driver, which is what I would like to showcase here. So I'm going to click on configure drivers, and we're going to go through the exact same steps as we've done before. I'm going to select Ethernet, and we're going to type in 192.168.0.231, which should be our device.

And again, just to briefly explain, the older versions of RSLogix 5000 were all using RSLinx Classic. The newer versions of Studio 5000 are using what's called FactoryTalk Linx. Again, it is just an updated version of the same software. It is called differently, so you might as well get used to using both if you are in the field.

But if everything is successful, it should also be able to browse to the exact same PLC. We can select the PLC. As you can see, it is the Joltek Rockwell Automation 5069 PLC002. I can press on Upload, and in just a couple of minutes, we should hopefully see the pop-up of Studio 5000. It takes just a moment.

We're running this inside of a VM, so it does not necessarily have all the computing power necessary to make it quick.

So what you will notice if you've never run Studio 5000 and connected to a PLC trying to upload, you will need to select a file. Again, I already have some of the files, so I'm going to navigate away. I'm going to just put this on the desktop. Let's see here. So I'm going to select desktop, select, and I'm just going to double-click.

Once again, it will create a new file. So this is a completely fresh file. I had not stored anything, and I had not gone online with the PLC. You will see create a new project file and upload. I'm going to press on yes. And if everything goes well, it will go through the process, of course, of pulling all the data from the controller, all the comments, because we are running Studio version...

I believe it is 32 or 34. Let's see here. It will just take a moment. What you will notice is that we are online with the controller. We are accessing it via the IP address. We are accessing this remotely on the specific machine. So the router is of great aid for this specific application. We have accomplished exactly what we were looking for. We can go into the different devices.

We can obviously view the Ladder Logic. This depends, of course, on your license and all of the other things, but the premise remains that we are able to wirelessly connect.

The last item that I did want to discuss and perhaps mention as it pertains to this video is the concept of a server or a jump box. So in many of these environments, as I've mentioned before, you do not necessarily have IT connectivity as you're commissioning the equipment, as you're just checking out I/O.

The problem is, of course, if you get disconnected, if you want to remote access into the machine, and you're running the software on your laptop, and you're trying to connect to a machine that is further out, the solution to that is a jump box. And again, this is something that you should expect once you have proper networks and you have proper IT infrastructure.

But temporarily, you can purchase one of these fairly inexpensive mini PCs. And I say fairly inexpensive a little bit in air quotes, because of course, it depends on what kind of power you need, how many people you would like to connect, what kind of software you want to run. But if all you're looking for is to be able to commission equipment, whether you're running Studio 5000, TIA Portal, if you're looking to run perhaps CODESYS or some of the other applications, all you need is a box.

And I've talked about this in the past in my training kits, but this box is 512 gigs of an SSD. It has sixteen gigs of RAM, which is plenty to connect into your network. And the way, of course, you address this is you can put this on the same network as the PLC and as the router, and it can be accessible directly via remote desktop if it's on.

Of course, Windows is heavily relevant in our industry, but it can also be accessed via the router that we have set up on a specific network to then tunnel into the box and of course, connect via a physical connection to the PLC. So this solves a lot of the challenges in our industry when it comes to connectivity, when it comes to troubleshooting, when it comes to commissioning equipment that I've talked about in the past.

And the reason, of course, is because it's going to be very close to the OT network. That means that if anything gets interrupted from your machine to the router and to the PLC, you're not going to lose parts of the project. This machine is physically wired to the PLC while you're remoting into this machine that runs Studio 5000, RSLogix 5000, TIA Portal, whatever you may need.

If you have any questions on any of these topics, don't hesitate to reach out. I know that there was a little bit of confusion when it comes to the training kits. There was a little bit of confusion on the OT networking side. So if you have any doubts, don't hesitate to ask. We'll do our best to answer.

The best place to reach us is going to be in the YouTube comment section. And of course, if you want to reach out to me personally, that's going to be through LinkedIn. See you next time.