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mikey431

Red Lions PLC and HMI

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Anyone has experience with Red Lions PLC and HMI ? any pro and con ,especially if we want to switch from AB to Red Lions ? Thank you

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Red Lion sponsors a form of support almost unknown to other companies: they routinely browse the PLC and control related internet forums and have a tech support guy answer questions related to Red Lion products. That is superior service in my opinion. Given that many products play on a nearly level playing field when it comes to technical performance (6 of one; half dozen of another) support can and should play a large role in a buying decision. I've even seen the president's name pop up on occasion. That's unheard of for any other manufacturer, that I'm aware of. Dan

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Setup of comm;s is seamless and easy, the smart text help is invaluable. Mapping between devices is the best on the market. Programming is simple. Had a few little gripes with programming (mainly cause you get use to diff things in diff brands) , however they were dealt with promplty, professionally. I would recommend the red lion over an AB screen any day. (For 1, serial communications are as they sould be easy to set up). 2. The number of available protocols to comm to devices is extensive. 3. They are a quality product. 4. When asking questions, you are deling with the guys who actually developed and wrote the programming software/ screens etc.. u cant; get any more closer to the coal face then that. BTW having the Web interface is super cool.

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I liked the old AB panelviews, but have heard so many negative comments about the PV+ line, that I recently switched to the Red Lion brand. I should have switched a long time ago. I highly recommend them.

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Ditto, I've used 12 of the G3s this year and have had no complaints. They are easy to program and my customers are very pleased with them

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I have never used the PLC. But I have the HMI. The HMI is really neat. It has tons of ports on it. You can talk to 2-3-4 different things at once. In the screen shot below, we used the HMI to talk to an SMC servo, and a Direct logic PLC. In the tag mappings, you can map tags to both devices in the same tag database. Heck, if there was no driver between the servo and PLC, you can use the HMI as a gateway. I've done that before on a small scale. For example you need the PLC to tell the servo to do something but you can't do it directly use the HMI to map it through or the internal memory in the HMI as a buffer. Pretty nice unit... Oh did anyone mention the Crimson software is a free download?

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FYI, we do not have a PLC. Our Modular Controller looks like a PLC, but it is not. It can do SOME things that PLCs do, but its original purpose was PID control. Since then we have added analog and digital I/O modules, but those are more or less just for indication. Regards, Dan Edited by danyost

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I have used quite a few G3's now from the 3" to the 10". I would not use any other make unless the customer specified it and i couldnt convince them to change. Great product with fantastic support. Edited by 504bloke

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I used Red Lion for the first time earlier this year and my experiences were good. It was easy to set up and my application worked first time (OK so I then made a few tweaks) but things like comms are simple. On my previous contract we were using Siemens Protool/WinCC (because we had to), the difference in ease of use was remarkable. The support both in the UK by our local distibutor (Seltec, Hull) and from the USA is excellent. So I have specified Red Lion on another project that I am quoting. The web interface makes it very flexible, and was in fact one of the deciding factor in our original decision to use Red Lion as it enabled us to site 2 viewing screens remote to the plant under control. Plenty of ports so we were able to pull in several different bits of existing kit into the HMI as well as the upgrade plc

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I have used a couple of Red Lions and they are great. They are easy to set up an program. On one of them I am using them as an interface between two different types of PLCs manipulating data in their structured text language and sending it back to PLC variables. The nicest option is that you can upload the complete program from the unit. AB panel view plus only keeps a compiled version. Giz.

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Haven't tried their PLC's. Not sure I would want to. Their old panel displays (current loops and such) work very well but are very expensive. I've since switched to Simpsons. I just tried their HMI. Not bad. I do have some gripes. I'm thinking of posting a full review when I get some time. Problems: 1. The USB stuff is a bit flaky the first time. Windows likes to complain about it. If you ever accidentally hit "no" at the wrong time, you have to manually go in and delete the driver, then unplug/plug it back in to get things to work correctly. It asks about a dozen times whether or not to install the drivers. Not sure what Windows is doing but it is definitely not "plug-and-play". More like "plug-and-pester". After the first pestering incident, no more problems. 2. Software is free. Panel is significantly less expensive than AB's product and about on par with CTC but more options in terms of sizes, etc. 3. Fast. As in boots fast and just works. 4. Setting up input ranges is a bit strange. And doesn't work always as expected. The AB PLC driver automatically scales timers to do 0.01 second timers --> seconds but doesn't really tell you that up front. So it is somewhat confusing. 5. They have "smart objects" and "dumb objects". And you sort of have to play around until you figure out which is which or you will have data typing issues that you can't figure out. 6. The event-trigger stuff didn't work right at all. I tried to create a tag that would be the mirror image of another tag (boolean opposite) and a "help" button. The whole idea was to animate help boxes over the top of the regular displays, making the regular ones disappear (visibility) whenever someone hit the help button. I had to use the virtual tag because you can't use an expression for visibility. Sounds great but the data would keep coming up invisible at the same time the help boxes did since the data was triggered off the virtual tag. In the end, I just ripped all this out and created separate screens. 7. Initially getting the PLC (PLC-5) configured was a huge trick. Since I wasn't sure about all the other stuff either, I couldn't tell when everything was working. The documentation on their device drivers at least in this case is very poor. 8. Support is good.

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Interesting to read such positive posts. If I never work with such a convoluted and over the top unstable bit of software called RS Studio again then I will be a happy bunny.

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well to put my $.02 in, our company has been testing quite a few of the redlion g310's. We are quite impressed with them. Everyone is sick to death with the atmosphere of Rockwell. I am not high enough up to be able to say for sure but it looks like all of our HMI's are being changed over to Redlion as they go bad. All people i have spoken to in our company is impressed with the performance,reliability, and customer service that Redlion has. i myself am pushing ,from a troubleshooters stand point, for the switch to Redlion because i was able to download the software FREE on my home computer, as well as documents, without an act from congress and the president. This allows me to have time to better learn the software and experiment at home, comms are much easier to deal with as well as programming. From me Redlion gets two thumbs up! Rockwell two thumbs down

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