Replacement Printer for Siemens S5 or S7 PLC

Siemens S5 PLC

Siemens S7 PLC

The Siemens range of Programmable Logic Counters (PLCs) are in wide use across industry to control equipment, some of which can cost £millions to replace.  The earlier Siemens S5 PLC could be coupled by a serial output interface to the now impossible to find, Siemens PT-88 printer connected to the Siemens CP-523 card, which means that a production line can grind to a halt due to a faulty printer which may be needed for audit reports.  The lack of information on control characters supported by the PT-88 printer did not help (even Siemens could not find much information on this).

The later Siemens S7 PLC could be connected to a dot matrix printer using a CP340-RS232C card which supported more printers.

The Retro-Printer module can be used as an interface between the RS232 output from both the S5 PLC and the S7 PLC serial cards and a printer.  This enables to provide the output as a series of electronic PDFs as well as still being able to print the output from the machine on a modern USB or network printer.

If you want to replicate this type of approach to modernise your use of the Siemens S5 PLC or the Siemens S7 PLC, please get in touch.