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moltra

replacement for AB Panelviews

28 posts in this topic

His post more closely resembled a flame than yours. Specific product experience and information is always a plus - particularly when it highlights different positive aspects of a system.

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We normally use a PV1500 or a Beckhoff 17" (with Intouch 9.5) for AB PLC's. A client specified L61, Intouch 9.5 and a Hope Industrial Systems 19" Touch Screen. Apart from the cost of the PC and Intouch License the HIS was REAL good value for money (even when shipped from US). Worked out cheaper than a standard PV1500+. More options to look investigate.

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I just put a Red Lion G3 6" on a paint machine about 2 months ago now. It replaced a Total Controls (now owned and screwed up be GE Fanuc) Panel jr. I've noticed these things about it so far: 1. The web server interface is nice but a tad clunky. I like the one from CTC a lot better but Red Lion is a bit less expensive and CTC's displays are known to have short life spans for some reason. 2. This thing is a chameleon. It plays very fast and loose with protocols. You can do a lot of things with just the protocol drivers and not even getting into the HMI part. This is very impressive but I'm not sure just what I'd do with it. I'm concerned about "separation of concerns", people turning displays off, etc. I could easily imagine having a Red Lion sitting in the PLC cabinet just acting as a translator and primitive troubleshooting tool though. 3. The graphics were a lot easier to get it to do something useful than any of AB's software but that seems to be a general statement. Panelview+ is a little better than Panelview standard in this regard but still nowhere close to the full power of a full blown HMI. In contrast, the Red Lion does probably have it's limits but there aren't many in this regard. It looks like it is somewhat easier for a neophyte to produce a working system. For example with a lot of HMI's, you've got to do this for a button: draw a box, place text on top of it with tag, set the box to trigger an event to ask for a value. With the Red Lion, this is much more intuitive. 4. It took a little while figuring out exactly the settings to get it to talk to a PLC-5. The documentation in this area really stinks. The manual is useless. There's a couple docs on the web site but they only sort of point the way. It took quite a bit of experimenting (and some inquiries on the Mr. PLC forum) to figure this out. 5. Working your way around the tag database and when to use tags vs. raw values is intuitive once you get used to it but this is one area where documentation is sorely lacking. It is on par with higher end HMI's in terms of capabilities and options. I like it once I got into it. Mixing the graphics values (colors, formatting) in with the tags though was a bit non-intuitive. 6. I tried to set up two in-memory points (variables, tags, whatever they are called). One was supposed to trigger off the other so that I had two points with opposite values. Then one would make all the normal readings appear and the other would make a bunch of question marks appear (for help screens). This worked right ONCE on the first screen. When you change screens, no matter what I did, the settings were always screwed up and you had to fiddle with the help menu ONCE to make the normal readings appear. Didn't matter if I flipped the state of the bits. In the end, I gave up and didn't use "derived points" or events or whatever they call it anymore. It just doesn't work reliably. 7. The "validation" expression is very slick (much better than what you usually get) but a bit frustrating. Conceptually if someone key punches in a value, you give it an expression where the variable "Data" is a placeholder with the temporary value. The expression must be true for the value to be accepted. What is non-obvious is that this is a RAW PLC value, not a scaled (engineering units) one. So if I have a 0.01 sec (PLC-5) timer, the timer is automatically converted to seconds internally and displays without scaling. BUT, the validation expression for 0-10 seconds is not (Data>=0 && Data<=10)...it's (Data>=0 && Data<=1000). 8. When to use "auto", "string", "numeric", and "integer" graphics is not very intuitive. I had to more or less just screw around until things worked correctly as far as displaying tag values. This is one of the more frustrating areas of the system. 9. With the AB drivers, it is not obvious when it works in decimal and when it works in octal. So watch out here since at least with the older PLC's (5 and SLC), octal is still a holdover from the PLC-2/3 days and it is not clear when the Red Lion driver is using one or the other. Overall, after having a couple months in operation, it seems to be as stable and hardy as a Panelview standard. It is much more hardy than a Panelview Plus. Once you get over some of the clunky parts of the system, it is pretty well designed. The units seem to be pretty quick overall. Nobody has been disappointed yet. Time will tell but probably my only concern is that only AB seems to be very big on giving you lots of physical keypad buttons to work with. I've had problems over time with touch screens in a dirty environment (even with anti-glare covers). This one seems to be holding up better than average already. I just have concerns about longevity. We also destroy the membrane keypads on regular PV's over time so it's not significantly better, but time will tell.

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