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Guest Will Harrington

GE Genius I/O into Allen-Bradley SLC-500

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I have a single GE Series 6 PLC rack with 12 Genius I/O blocks on 2 drops. The Genius blocks communicate to the Series 6 through a pair of Bus Controller w/o Diagnostics cards in the Series 6 rack. I want to make the Series 6 rack go away and replace it with an Allen-Bradley SLC-500 rack. The PLC program is vanilla-flavor (200+ rungs, nothing special expect for barebones tension control loop). Management will not fund a project to replace the Series 6 rack AND all Genius block upgrade to a SLC-500 rack with FlexLogix I/O drops. Looking for a way to keep the Genius blocks (for now) and upgrade the Series 6 to an A-B SLC-500. All of our production lines have SLC-500 or PLC-5 PLCs, and this PLC is running a near-virgin 1987 PLC program. Thus, all of our electricians and techs have lost their knowledge of GE Logicmaster programming skills. I have found SST has an X-link box that bridges the networks, but the GE side calls for a full-length ISA card (long X-link box) and the A-B remote I/O card calls for a short-length ISA card (short X-link box). Ideas?

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A couple of things stand out here. Twelve nodes on a single Genius bus is not very heavily populated, but you have 12 nodes on two busses. This leads me to believe that the original designer was concerned about issues of scan time. You may find you have difficulties tuning the tension control loops if you introduce too much latency into the data coming from the Genius I/O. Your bridge will have to read in the Genius data and map it to A-B I/O memory. That will take time. Be careful it doesn't take too much time. Here's a possible solution for a 'roll your own' bridge. Use a GE Fanuc 90-30 PLC with one or two Genius Bus Controllers and a DeviceNet slave module. The PLC won't need to do any ladder logic, just handle the data on the Genius network(s) and transfer it to DeviceNet. It may turn out that the hardware and commissioning costs of installing a bridge will exceed the cost of replacing the Genius I/O. You may be able to sell the Genius blocks on ebay and recover some of the costs of conversion.

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Years ago there was a clever company called Pro-Log, who built "STD-Bus" industrial computing products. Before their acquisition by Motorola's industrial computer group, they made a GENIUS / RIO bridge device. It was really pretty neat; It was a GENIUS master and a RIO slave and you could set up block transfers to it and emulate multiple racks and other nifty stuff. According to my research, it was fast and compact. But.... They stopped making it. There just wasn't enough GENIUS conversion going on. When I spoke with the product manager he said he had parts and drawings on the shelf, and could deliver ten of them in a month once he had a solid order. This was of course the classic "cart/horse inversion" problem; my customer wanted to see a demo before he'd invest anything in the conversion from Series Six, and I didn't have the budget to buy the minimum number of GENIUS/RIO converters. From my research about the Pro-Log gateway, it was superior to the X-Link because the X-Link only transferred one "datagram" at a time from the RIO image to the GENIUS bus. This would like sending a book in the mail, one page at a time. The Pro-Log gateway transferred whole big blocks of datagrams at once. I'm no GE expert, and this project never flew, but it might shed some light on why there isn't too much in this product category on the market.

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