MaxPowers76

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About MaxPowers76

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  1. We have several pieces of equipment in production that utilize Kinnetix 5500 drives with motion.  We are running into issues controlling the Master Clock the drives are looking to for time synchronization.  In many cases piece of equipment, A is looking at equipment B as its master time source. Since we start and end jobs in production at any time of the day, A might get shut down which then crashes B or vice versa, C might get turned on and become the master time sources crashing both A and B.  Are there techniques that can be used to control this?
  2. Industrial Controls Network Design

    Thanks - Ill see if we can get in touch with a rep as a lot of our controls are AB/Rockwell. I could be very wrong about this, but when I look at documentation from Rockwell on industrial networking I interpret their solutions as being focused on heavily deploying switches throughout the plant floor then linking up the industrial network with the IT network with a router or layer 3 device.  If I am interpreting that right, is there value in that type of design vs. using central layer 3 switches that have vLans segregating the PLC network from other business networks?
  3. IT guy here. The manufacturer I work for is on a path of connecting its production equipment/industrial controls to the IT network to start collecting data. Today, we have a single VLAN dedicated to the industrial controls and have a variety of different PLCs and automation devices that plug into it. Some of these devices plug right into our Cisco 3850 IDFs and others are connected through Stratix 2500 lightly managed switches that then hit the 3850. Our plant floor is fairly dynamic, so equipment/controls move between lines and come on/offline as lines are set-up for different jobs.  At any given time there are approx. 45 IP addresses reporting on the PLC vLAN.  We are running into situations where different equipment that is connected to the network will crash at random intervals.  In some cases these crashes will occur with a piece of equipment just powered on and not even running and/or in times of the week when there is very little else active on the network.  Researching the alarms we get usually lead back to motion/clock delays or I/O faults that are considered a networking problem, and unplugging a device from the network has eliminated the issues, however this has put us in a spot where we don’t know how to proceed to get things connected again with stability.  From the IT side, the bandwidth utilized on the PLC segment is very minimal and the crashes that occur are isolated to an individual machine while all others stay up.  Using WireShark, I see Broadcast traffic traversing the vLan but it is difficult for me to determine if the level of traffic is an issue or not? To attempt to resolve the issue from the IT side, I am suggesting we add more vLANs to reduce the number of devices on each segment.  We have not implemented this route yet.  Since I don’t know much about the industrial controls side, I wanted to run this scenario past this forum.  Outside of network changes, is there anything we should consider from the PLC configuration side that would help increase resiliency to network traffic if that is the root issue?  Is there anything I should consider differently with how our IDF switches are configured? Storm Control perhaps?