RsLogix 5000 v17 Released

[TimWilborne 108]

RsLogix 5000 Version 17 is available for download http://www.rockwellautomation.com/support/webupdates/

[pandersen 0]

That was fast, my AB rep told me it would be released 'in about 30 days' two days ago!

[BobLfoot 301]

Let us know how it runs "from the bleeding edge" TW. It will be months perhaps a year before my company lets us move the V17.

[TimWilborne 108]

Have to keep them all here, have one company that is still in version 12

[Guided_monkey 0]

And the difference from V16.00 to V17.00 is????

[paulengr 44]

Added a bunch of small extra options to various motion functions and such. A lot of what I noticed were tightening things up. They cleaned up a lot of places where you could put nonsensical values into motion commands that would cause a fault and instead made them do the "right" thing. The two major new features I saw are: They added an internal model control (IMC) type loop controller and a couple multivariable ones. These are add-ons that you have to pay extra for, similar to the fuzzy logic controller. Online partial download support. This is kind of hard to describe. You could for instance make a bunch of modifications to a program offline and do a partial download. Instead of going to progrram mode and downloading everything, it will add the new UDT's, change/add routines, and other program changes. This all works online. As far as I can tell it's just taking the same things that you could always do in online programming mode and "automating" the changes so that you can do bulk changes all at once from an offline copy. You still can't for instance modify an existing UDT online. But you could create a new one offline and that will be transferred in the partial download. There's apparently a performance problem with the on board serial port. They improved it substantially but didn't make the performance problem go away entirely. The KB said something like performance improved from 2-10 times slower down to only 1.5-6 times slower when using the serial port. It sounds to me like the serial port uses the main CPU (not the communication processor) and that the UART is either very slow or very stupid or that for some reason they can't use interrupts (probably to avoid some real time gaurantee issues) so they are stuck polling the UART for activity. This showed up somehow in the change from Rev 15 to Rev 16. Now that I know this, I'll avoid using the serial port at all costs in the future. There's a KB entry for this if you search for it (I forgot what the number was). Other than partial downloads, since I don't use motion instructions yet, I wasn't really all that interested. I'm thinking of waiting until December (in case there are minor revs with bug fixes) before I start using it. What I didn't see mentioned is that every time they come out with a new Rev (15 and 16), they also break the redundancy functions. Then a few months later, the redundant version comes out. Rev 17 was supposed to put the patch in the first time. No word in the KB article on whether this happened or not. Edited 3 Aug 2008 by paulengr