automation.engineer

That one sure looks nice! I saw one before that an A-B engineer brought to school once to give us an controlLogix trainning I remember joking that the box enclosure he was carrying was worth more than all our cars put together :D

That is really useful thanks for the info!

So I finally graduated and now it is time for me to find work . I was hoping for some advice from people with experience on a variety of topics to strengthen my value on the automation scene. Here are some questions for those of you who have experience: 1. Which plc's should I get familiar with? ( I am currently familiar with the Allen Bradley controllers 500 and 5000 using Rsview and Rslogix ) 2. Which communication protocols should I get familiar with? 3. Which other software are useful to aid and compliment for automation ? ( I am thinking along the line of tools like Excel, Access, Crystal Reports, Autocad etc) 4. Things I should strenghten on when dealing with A-B software like Rslogix, Rslinx and Rsview (or others!) 5. Other Topics I should study that could be complementary to automation ? 6. I took the Fundamental Engineer test this last April before graduation and passed it (it was pretty hard since I couldn't actually study for it because of my capstone project but I passed it :D), will this test along with the PE(when i take it) would compliment my value as an engineer on the automation on USA or is it just a personal thing to have as I have heard allot outside the power industry? 7. Any convenient languages that would be useful to know for places who are heavily investing on automation? 8. Finally, where do you think the automation industry is going too and which things should I as a newbie engineer should start getting familiar with? I will really appreciate any feedback you can give me from any of those questions, so far I have the whole summer to study them and go to the beach until I get a job!

Thats nice to know! I personaly wanted to try the PIDE FBD but since the companies standard was ladder logic i had instead to use the PID instruction. Thanks for the advice tho it can be helpful later!

Now here are other things I found important and that I would like to share with the forum: RSVIEW32 Problems with Displays with too many scripted fields: Rsview32 seems to have a problem regarding a screen heavily Scripted ( I made some displays that were supposed to display more than 40 fields of information with allot of IF. Else fields. This made lost of communications to this fields both emulated and connected to the controller. Also Heavily Scripted events may give some problems as well. So if you run in to this problem you might want to check your events and or displays with heavy logic , in my case I just removed some Aesthetic dynamic content and that fixed it. RSVIEW32 and Rslogix Tags: This probably is something basic but that made me stumble in to some problems when I started using rsview32. RSVIEW32 can only reference Controller Tags not Program Tags. Rslinx classic vs Rslinx Enterprise If you have a license for Rslinx Enterprise use it, it seems to be more efficient. Well this is for my answer and tips for those using for Rsview32 and rslogix5000, when some more things come to mind where I got in to trouble and I had to solve them I will post them later! Finally Thanks allot for all the people who took time to help out with my questions!

So I finally finished by end of career project using RSVIEW32 and an Allen Bradley ControlLogix controller, this site has provided allot of helpful information by people answering questions that I asked and by searching previous posts that had very useful information so now I will answer all the questions I had and to which I stumbled in to some problems and I was able to find the problem to them. Question 1: (they are not in the order I made them) Hello: I am having the following problem: I am trying to connect to a controllogix plc by using a serial data cable, the transmission rate is 19200 baud rate by using the autoconfigure utility. The program is rather big (about 1.2 megabytes) and while the plc is in REM it is rather imposible to move around it (it takes forever to do an action), If I look at the processor slow of the plc I got green lights .. What could be the cause of my problem and how can I access it? for a program like this I would need a bigger bandwidth like ethernet? We have been developing this for a University project (end of career project) and we just got the plc and things are starting to get frustratingThanks in advance!! Answer: For this I made a mistake when I configured the drivers on RSLINX I reconfigured it and put on the correct drivers, I also had a problem configuring the RSVIEW32 node using the correct drivers for a DF1 connection for a controlLogix, since all the drivers that appeared for a direct connection were for previous versions of the PLC I had to do a DDE topic in rslinx that pointed to the correct node of the physical controller, by pointing to this topic on the node configuration of RSVIEW32 I was able to connect to with a decent latency between the pc that had rsview32 and the controller. Question 2: How to print from an HMI? Since we ended up using a SCADA instead of a touch panelview it was easy to print since all that had to be done were to use PrintScreen commands used on RSVIEW32 and you can easly set it to use the default printer of the computer to print. Question 3: Before I can graduate I have to do a final project . The project that I choose involves upgrading the control system of an old sterilization machine using an ab contrologix 5000 . I already received some of the documentation from the machine but the most important documents have alot of important stuff missing, an example of this is that there is no document that outlines what all the variables that modify the documented phases mean, asside from the ones I can find in the process and instrumentation diagram (RTD,s selenoids etc). Since I have no experience controlling temperature and all my knowledge lies on undergraduate control theory, I am hoping for advice on anything I should worry about, any books or specific topics I should read up some more, etc. I also have some questions like : What would be the best way to implement and tune the PID gains (kp, ki, kd) if I don't have the transfer function for the system ( building up the transfer function of the system is out of the question since that would be a end of career project itself) ? should I use the old PID command or the PIDE? Answer: I ended up using the old PID instruction, the Proportional gain was calibrated first, then the Integrative, and the derivative to achieve the desirable stability and speed of the controller. Also it was an important point to put the PID instructions on a separate task of the periodic type that matched the 20ms analog module.

I am trying to connect rsview32 to a contrologix5561 through a DF1 cable ( RS232). I made the configuration of the topic on Rslinx, got the driver installed and when I enter in to system on the rsview32 I configure the channel 3 as an AB DF1-Half-Duplex connection (DF-1) which is the same as I configured with my driver in Rslinx . The problem arrises when I try to add a new node, I used the channel I just configured but when I try to set up the station I get the pop up message "Invalid selection, cause: Device type is not supported". It is important to add that I can load the rslogix program to the plc through the same rslinx configuration. What could be the cause of this problem?

Thanks for the information guys I will give this a Try. Here is some more information on the program. It is 1.02 mb (my mistake from before) it has 59 subroutines, and with some exceptions all subroutines are connected directly to the main. I didn't know how to program in Rsview ( someone else was supposed to take care of this and I consulted with him and he said it was imposible to do the following in rsview) so I did all the logic on how to program a Cycle that consists of up to 20 steps on rslogix itself by making a 2 dimensional structure array that I use as a database ( I don't know if this could be one of the problems) I Store values and alot of information about error bits of parameters, interlocks, strings etc in them and I use them to load them on the one dimensional versions (2 of them) which I use to check cycles, create them and run them. So now that I know how to use rsview to some extent I think I could have done that rather diferently to save my plc some scan times.

Hello: I am having the following problem: I am trying to connect to a controllogix plc by using a serial data cable, the transmission rate is 19200 baud rate by using the autoconfigure utility. The program is rather big (about 1.2 megabytes) and while the plc is in REM it is rather imposible to move around it (it takes forever to do an action), If I look at the processor slow of the plc I got green lights .. What could be the cause of my problem and how can I access it? for a program like this I would need a bigger bandwidth like ethernet? We have been developing this for a University project (end of career project) and we just got the plc and things are starting to get frustratingThanks in advance!!

Hello! I know this is an old topic but I was just getting this error and had been breaking my head on how to fix it. In my case after trying the firewall setup/ applying rslinx patches (I even updated to rslinx pro 2.52 and it didnt fix it) it happend to be another process that was loading on start up (malware named amvo.exe) once I removed it from start up (even before cleaning it) rslinx started working after the first restart. So if anybody gets this annoying rslinx problem you might want to go to start > run msconfig and when the msconfig utility pops up go to the start up tab and disable any services you might have running there.

I need help on connecting RsView32 to Crystal Report. I wish to print a report after every batch. The report must contain the pressure and the temperature from a single RTD(Analog Data) . The sampling rate of my report must be every minute for 45 minutes. And I need to be able to print the trend generated in RsView TrendX. I was told that crystal report was the perfect tool for this tasks. So I downloaded but didn't find any way to connect it. I read and looked for info and understand it must be by a OPC or DDE server but im not sure and i dont have any idea on how to setup de communication. PLZ if someone can Help me with this i Would really really appreciate it!! Thanks in advance my system is composed of a scada (RsView32) and a ControLogix 5000. And the data is confidencial so it shouldn't be stored just printed. Its for an Autoclave and i need to generate a after-batch report

Hello I have been trying for about 15 minutes to get the FBC instruction to work using RSLOGIX 5000 without any success I configured a Tag for Source, Reference and Result each of them are an array[5] (they all have different names). I also made a Control Tag for the cmp control and the result control ( I put the lenght of both to be 5). Now I put different Values for the Source and Reference arrays but I don't get value any values to be inputed in the Result array as a cause of my Source/Reference arrays being different. I am going to tinker with it a bit more if I am able to find what I am doing wrong I will post it in here else any help that someone can give me will be appreciated thanks! -newbie automation engineer

Definitley I need to install Rsview as well to try that out.

Hello Everyone this is my current problem. I am using rslogix emulate 5000 along with Rslogix to emulate a simple program to practice some instructions. (This is the link I used in case anyone wants to emulate something and just started using the 5000 family: http://www.plcdev.com/a_quick_tutorial_on_..._emulator_5000) Anyhow with those settings I get an I/O fault When I type the following line in a rung: XIC(Local:3:I.Data[0].0) OTE(Local:3:O.Data[0].0); In this case I see the fault light flashing. I can activate the input element from rslogix itself but I can't toogle them from rslogix emulate chassis. It will work fine if I use the following instead: XIC(Local:3:I.Data[1].0) OTE(Local:3:O.Data[0].0); my question is: what is the difference from using Local:3:I.Data[1].0 against Local:3:I.Data[0].0. This means to be that when I configure a generic card I have to use the following configuration: Assembly Instance Size Input 1 2 Output 2 1 Configuration 16 0 instead of: Assembly Instance Size Input 1 1 Output 2 1 Configuration 16 0 and when I invoke the input I will have to do it in the Local:3:I.Data[1].x element. Thanks in advance.

Thanks alot for the info guys I will let you know how it goes when we are at that stage of implementation.