Duffanator

Or you could go hardcore cheap like us and use Microsoft Paint and paste it into an Excel spreadsheet with your companies logo on it

I got mine in 3 days. Apparently there was one in stock here and I needed it quickly so I told our Mitsubishi rep that I needed it. I'm not sure how long it will take to get another one in from out of the country. I told our Mitsubishi rep that we will need at least one more for stocking purposes, so there should be more coming. He also said he was going to look into when this will be a stocked item for them too but I haven't heard back from him yet. It is much more accurate than a 4-20 mA signal from a converter. I would definatly look into it. I was very impressed with the module and I'll definatly use it again on another project.

Hey all, I'm getting a project together to do a sortation line and I want to do the weighing via the Q-series PLC I'm installing. Does anyone know what the best A/D card to use for getting a millivolt signal from a loadcell? The loadcell will be a Weigh-Tronix 100# load brick at 2 mV/V. Thanks!

If you're using a Q-series PLC then there are a few options. There is the MES module (both the MES interface IT and the regular MES module) and also there is a datalogging module that you can get that will send information to a PC. The MES modules transfer information to a database and once that information is in the database you can do whatever you want to it (it's just a SQL database). The datalogging module has software that comes with it but I have yet to play with it so I can't tell you a lot about that one.

FYI: The Q61LD module is Awesome!. From my initial testing it is way more accurate than the Weigh-tronix 127 scale head that was installed and the auto-zero feature works very nicely. The "filtering" (it's called averaging in the module literature) options are many and varied. You can dial the filtering in easily with just a little tweaking. I'm very impressed. The scale head that was there fluctuated a lot while the scale motor was running but with a little tweaking on this module it's rock solid. The manual isn't as straight forward as it could be, but that's a minor quibble. Another quality Mitsubishi product!

I have GX-Developer 8.83M and 8 configurators installed on a Windows 7 laptop with no problems so far. I don't have to run it in a XP Virtual Machine. I think (for the most part anyway) anything designed to run on Windows Vista will work with Windows 7. It's the same basic Kernal with some slight changes. I haven't had any problems as of yet.

I would have posted it but I got frustrated and deleted the whole thing and started over in ladder Oh well... I just wanted to see if anyone else had any experience with it and knew some tricks to get things to compile in less steps. Maybe using functions instead of writting out math in code or something like that. I'm using GX Developer Version 8.83M. We haven't gotten GX Works2 yet, but we will probably get it soon.

Crossbow, do you know if there is a configurator for this module, or is it too new?

Awesome, that's exactly what I needed. It even does averaging for in motion systems! I didn't know that module even existed, that's why I come here to ask questions Thanks Crossbow! Inntele, I did think about an external converter as well. I've done that before but I wanted to know if it was possible to go directly to the PLC. Apparently it is Thank you for the reply.

Yeah, I would put it after the transformer too. In a real pinch (if you didn't have such a transformer) you could probably wire a 240 single phase motor from one leg of 480 to ground (depending on your source power that is...) and run it off of 277 Volts. It would probably last you a few days until you got something in to replace it.

We do Infrared testing on our panels once per year. All Mod-5 and Mod-6 boxes and any control panel with sizable starters or fuse holders. In our environment a lot of that stuff gets corrosion on it and causes bad connections. After a while it heats up and then we have all kinds of fuse blowing problems and motor overload tripping problems. We used to have a company come in an do it for us, but the cost of a Infrared camera came down in recent years so we bought one (for $7000) and now we do it ourselves. Actually, it comes in very handy for troubleshooting too. I recently used it on a refridgeration control panel to find a bad fuse holder that was heating up to over 250 degrees (the fuse would blow randomly during the day). We changed the fuse holder and after that no more problems It also is good for checking sealing heads and other heating heads on our machines. Well worth the money if you can afford one.

I upgraded to Windows 7 on one of my home PC's and it is really nice. It made me see just how much Vista sucked. It's very nice to click on the my computer and see everything connected to the computer. No more going through the settings tab to change printer settings or hardware settings! I haven't used it with any programming software yet but other than that it's awesome. I actually just wiped my other Vista PC and put windows XP back on because I couldn't deal with it anymore. After I upgraded it to Vista from XP it's never been the same. Now it's back to being fast and running all my games correctly again Another point: When our Mitsubishi rep came in to demonstrate a module he was using a laptop with Windows 7 running a virtual machine for Microsoft SQL Server 2005. (The module writes to an SQL Database) and it worked great. Only had one issue where the network cable was unplugged from a USB Dongle and when the network cable was reconnected the module couldn't connect to the SQL Database again, but I think that had more to do with the USB Dongle interfacing with the virtual PC than Windows 7.

Has anyone done an upgrade from Windows Vista to Windows 7 yet? I had recently bought a new computer and it came with a free upgrade to Windows 7 when it comes out later this month. I'm just wondering if anyone has had any experiences (good or bad) with doing the upgrade. The computer in question has Vista premium 64 bit. I know at least one of you Techno-freaks has done this already!

Hey all, We are going to be setting up a downtime tracking system at our plant soon and since we have mostly Mitsubishi PLC's it would make sense (maybe) to use other Mitsubishi products for this as well. Has anyone had any experience (good or bad) with any of Mitsubishi's "F@catory floor" stuff? Like OPC servers and their data collection systems? What are their pluses or minuses? What all can they do as far as data collection and downtime tracking?

We usually use them on stainless panels and when we put them on we will put some 5-minute epoxy on the corners. That seems to hold up the best for us.

You can check these guys out: http://www.qsicorp.com/ Their stock terminals won't get down to the temperatures you are talking about (they are lower than most) but they do make custom terminals. Perhaps with heaters built in?

Happy Thanksgiving to you too! I hope all went well

Not sure what you can do to restore the program on your pc, but you should be able to pull the program back out of the PLC. You will have to redo all of the documentation stuff but at least you will have the program.

I don't see anything obvious.... but I haven't used that HMI software before either. I would create a test page and put a few different word lamps on it that look at the same register in different ways and see which one is displaying the number correctly.

I think everyone does it a little different.... We do: Black - Any AC voltage over 120 volts Red - Any AC voltage 120 volts or below White - Neutral Blue - 0 Volts DC Yellow - + Volts DC (Either 12 or 24) I think the accepted "universal" thing for +DC is blue and 0 volts DC is Blue with White but we don't do it because it's too easy to confuse the two. I remember reading about yellow being +DC from an outside voltage source and Orange was some kind of interlock or something? Not sure, but we don't really use them.

Sounds like it's displaying in BCD or HEX instead of just regular decimal. Actually, it sounds like your PLC (or whatever it is) is counting in BCD or HEX and when you try and display it it looks weird because 10 in HEX is 16 in Decimal value.

When I was in high school and in Tech school we had a simple robot that we could program with a DOS program. Basicly MOV 60,120,40 type deal and we programmed it to take little metal barrels out of a holder and stack them into a pyramid. It took a lot of trial and error but it was a good learning experience and it looked cool when it was done. A lot of people liked it when we had an open house. Of course, it would be a lot cooler if you actually built the robot but I don't know if that would be too advanced or not.... I don't think it would be too hard and it would give the kids a good lesson in PLC programming. Everything contols is done with PLC or PAC units now so you might as well start teaching them young. I wish we would have done some of that in school, I would have loved playing around with it back then and it would have helped a lot now as well.

Hey all, I was just wondering... Is there a comprehensive function manual for the Q-series PLC's? We have one from a long time ago for the FX PLC's and it had every function and an explanation of what it did as well as some examples of how to use it. Is there anything like that for the newer PLC's? I know there are many more functions now-a-days and it would be a pretty big book but it would be very useful.

Ooops, I missed that post. I will check that out then, thanks!

Hey all, I was going through the instruction set in GXDeveloper and ran across these functions: FIFW and FIFR (FIFO write and read). The details for the write function is this: How do you create a data table? There is no part of this function that defines how big the data table is or anything like that. Do you create a data table seperatly and then just access it with these functions? This sounds interesting and I'd like to play around with it if anyone knows any additional information about it. Thanks!