The Matrox Design Assistant portal can be used to monitor communication that uses industrial protocols, as well as communication via I/O pins. The COMMS portal page provides information specific to each type of communication available.
The ETHERNET/IP tab of the COMMS portal page displays a DataToPLC table and a DataFromPLC table. These tables display information about the fields that are read from and written by the PLC, respectively, using the EtherNet/IP protocol. This information includes the name, data type, value, offset, and data stored in each field.
Note that when you are using the EtherNet/IP protocol with Quick Comm enabled, the predefined fields in the DataToPLC and DataFromPLC tables are automatically displayed when you access the ETHERNET/IP tab of the COMMS portal page.
The PROFINET tab of the COMMS portal page displays a series of data tables, each of which provides information about the fields that are written by or read from the PLC, using the PROFINET protocol. This information includes the name, data type, value, offset, and data stored in each field. The portal page includes a table for control fields, a table for status fields, and tables for fields specific to each physical camera. There are also DataToPLC and DataFromPLC tables. These data tables contain the information for custom (user-defined) data fields.
Note that when you are using the PROFINET protocol with Quick Comm enabled, the predefined Quick Comm fields in the data tables are automatically displayed when you access the PROFINET tab of the COMMS portal page.
The MODBUS tab of the COMMS portal page displays 4 data tables, each of which provides information about the fields that are written by or read from the PLC, using the Modbus protocol. These data tables are the coil, discrete input, holding register, and input register tables of the runtime platform. Each table displays the name, data type, value, register number, and data stored in each field.
The I/O tab of the COMMS portal page provides a list of available I/O pins. The information provided in this list includes the pin's signal name (for example, Aux IO 1), direction with respect to the runtime platform (input or output), bit index, and value (on/off) of each signal. It also displays the transition count of each pin, if this property is enabled for the pin in the Platform Configuration dialog.