Mendon Systems

The CQM1 has a 1 minute clock pulse. You could use that to drive a counter with a preset of 1440 (minutes per day). The problem with that approach is how you would synchronize it so that the counter always starts with 0 minutes at midnight. It might be simpler just to set up a counter for each output and reset them every time the output cycles.

Not much for the most part!! The other HMI's seem to have download and upload functions, but nothing even remotely like the CXP compare function. I mostly use Maple Systems (Weintek) because they are a lot less expensive than the NS and have some additional capabilities, but they do not have any compare function at all. I can't recall any that I have used in the past which had a compare capability.

Modbus and Devicenet are inherently slow serial protocols because of the overhead involved. As Bob suggests, the best thing to do is break you communications up into as many separate loops as possible and run the communications at the highest possible baud rate.

I suspect that a bit of an idea what type of systems you will be dealing with might help us answer your questions. For example: you would use a significantly different system design to track pallets in a warehouse than you would to move food products to a packaging machine or to move bulk materials from a mine to a processing plant or to move silicon wafers in a clean room.

You can turn off the duplicate output warning by changing the "Program Check" options under the "PLC" tab if it bothers you.

I would suggest doing it a different way. Use a D register as the timer preset and use your MOV instruction to change the value of the D register. Be sure that the D register is initialized to an appropriate value before you try to use the timer.

I took your original example and added a new program to it re-written it the way that I would write the program. It includes all the examples you asked about. Maybe this will help you. BAT_OmronProba.cxp

That depends on your system configuration. If you have the system memory ($SW0 - $SW40) assigned to PLC memory addresses you can do it within your PLC program by writing the screen number into the appropriate register. That might be $SW0 if the alarm screen is a main screen or $SW1, $Sw4, or $SW7 for a popup window. There is more information in section 3 of the NS programming manual.

These questions apply to CX-Drive version 2.7.1.4 1) When connected to a drive, CX-Drive allows me to verify the parameter settings in the drive against the program on the PC. There is also a check box to verify the drive program, but CX-Drive will never let me select it. It would be EXTREMELY useful to know if the program currently in the drive matches the one on the computer. 2) CX-Drive does not save the user display parameters (U001-U032) to the parameter file. It is a real PAIN to manually enter these into multiple drives. I ended up creating a spreadsheet in Excel to keep track of the selections to make entering them easier. Is there any way around either of these issues???

I have used the CQM1-CIF02 with USB adapters with mixed success but I can usually come up with a combination that works. I carry several different adapters with me because they seem to be inconsistent about working with the CQM1-CIF02 and CS1W-CN226. I have had the best luck with the Belkin F5U409 and a Keyspan USA-19HS serial adapters.

I suspect your problem is that the PLC is too fast for your data rate. Your pulse rate could be as low as 5 per second. I had a similar problem with an irrigation system control a few years ago. I ended up using the AVG function running in a cyclic task that only ran once per second in order to get enough pulse counts to get a real value. Even then it was a bit erratic.

FOUND THEM!!! They are located in the registry at HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\OMRON\CX-Programmer v9.4\Toolbars

Yes, I am well aware of the OPT files. Version 9.4 doesn't seem to properly recognize OPT files that were generated by version 9.3. It also doesn't seem to always recognize the OPT files that were generated by version 9.4. The only part of the file it seems to have trouble with is the toolbar positions. Everything else seems to work OK. edit: Actually ...... after looking at the OPT file contents, that doesn't appear to be where the toolbar positions are maintained. There are entries in there for the window positions (like the watch window) but I didn't find any references to the toolbars.

Thanks Mike! I suspect that version 8.6 might have a problem, but this is an older NS5 (2009 maybe) -V2 so I was curious about any published limitations. I upgraded the NS5 from the original version 6.4 firmware to version 8.6 and it started acting weird. After I loaded version 8.4 everything works OK. When running 8.6 it would crash whenever a numeric display with a 32 bit float was displayed requiring a terminal restart. It worked OK with numeric displays for Int and BCD data types. WEIRD!!!

Is there a table somewhere that shows which version of RecoverUpdate is compatible with the various NS terminal versions?? I discovered the hard way this weekend that they don't all play happily together. I have an NS5-MQ00B-V2 here that works fine with version 8.4 but acts weird with version 8.6.

According to the CX Drive Programming manual, the multiply and divide instructions are an eight bit number (-128 to +127) multiplied or divided by a 32 bit number (-2147483648 to 2147482347). That simply doesn't make any sense at all!! Has anyone tried these functions to see if that is really the way they work?? What I need to do is divide the value in D002 by the motor's nameplate current to calculate approximately the actual slip % of the motor at load. Those are both 16 bit values so according to the manual it can't be done.

I looked at the Micrologix first, but according to the catalog the Ethernet interface is only rated for temperatures above 0 degrees C. I need at least -20 degrees C.

It has been a while since I configured an A-B system (PLC5 days) so rather than try to learn all the new stuff I would like some expert opinions. I have an application which requires about 50 remote sites to be linked back to a PLC over an Ethernet connection. The link they want to use is fiber Ethernet because the sites are miles apart. Each site will require at least two analog inputs and one digital input. Some require more inputs and a few need some digital outputs also. All of this gets collected up by one PLC and handed off to an existing Intellution SCADA system. Just browsing the A-B catalogs it looks like a Compact Logix L23 CPU with Flex I/O over Ethernet adapters would be the appropriate setup. Comments will be appreciated.

Thanks guys! I sort of thought it wasn't going to be that simple. Nothing with A-B ever is. I found one page in the catalogs that lists some connection limits but I'm not sure if it is the one Bob was referring to.

Possibly a buffer overrun?? It could be the PLC is sending data faster than the servo can process it. Is there any way you can control the transmission to see if slowing it down helps?

Michael I was able to locate a slightly newer version of the same manual with some text examples in it. MX2 Drive Programming Manual V0-1.pdf

Has anyone had any experience with the programming function in CX Drive for the 3G3MX2 inverters?? I was able to get a copy of the manual and it appears to be quite powerful compared to other drives.

That's the manual I have. It is not completely accurate and is missing some useful information. The one that I had the most trouble with was the TD function. You have to be very careful that the TimerSet function is only executed ONCE, not easy when running in parallel with other operation. It is much easier to do that in Text than Flowchart.

Is there any documentation available on the text programming language?? The only documentation available here so far is a preliminary flow chart programming manual which is not all that accurate. I managed to work my way through a medium complexity program. but it would be a lot easier with more information.

Thanks for the information. That feature is just being released here so nobody knows much about it yet. It sure looks good.