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TrevorD

Controllogix firmware upgrade

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Hi all

I have just entered the extremely frustrating world of Studio/rslogix5000. 

After fighting for 2 years i have managed to convince management to purchase studio 5000 standard edition version 32 for our site. 

I was extremely happy until i found out that the 1756-L61/B controllogix i was trying to upload from wasnt in the version 32 library. 

After some reading online i found i was able to download version 20 for free and use that. So off i went to our machine to try upload the program when i find the firmware of the PLC is version 17

After downloading version 17 of rslogix i found that my activation is invalid and that i only have a 7 day grace period. 

After some more reading i find that i am only able to get a minimum of version 20 for my version 32 licence. 

If this is all correct, my question is then in regards to flashing the firmware of the plc before my 7day (now 3 day) grace period ends. 

The rack consist of a few input and output modules, a Ethernet bridge module and a sercos 8 axis motion control module. 

Would flashing the firmware on the CPU to version 20 effect any of those modules? would i have to flash the firmware of them too? 

Am i doing something wrong to only be getting version 20 and 32 not 17? 

Trevor

 

 

 

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Hmmm, that's interesting. I'm surprised the license can't activate the older versions, that's not been our experience. We have some Logix 5k licenses that date back to v10 and have no problem activating up to v30 (the newest we've installed). Some licenses of Studio 5000 we bought at v24 also activate back to v10.

There's an option in the Activation Manager when you're hosting the license to your PC where you can select how to host the license. One of the methods supports back to the old versions, the other doesn't. It doesn't work smoothly, though. The last time I had to re-host a license, I ended up having to contact their chat support (free for activation support) to get the license to activate both the older versions and the newer ones.

We have machines in service right now ranging from v11 to v30, so I know it can be done.

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Thanks Joe

That's what i would assume. It doesn't seem right to me that you buy the latest version and then all older models are now redundant so you can't get access to them.  It's very possible i am doing this all wrong. I don't understand why like other software its not backwards compatible in terms of version 32 being able to do all versions of plc firmware upto 32. It must be nuts requiring 20 versions of the same software. 

https://rockwellautomation.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/1083368

When i read this technote i understood it as im only able to get a minimum of version 20. If there is a way im able to rehost the licence or any other options im very open the hearing about it. i'm only 3 days experienced with everything so it it is possible i'm missing something. 

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I would definitely get online and start a chat session for activations support. I "followed the procedure" and couldn't get it to work either until they did "something magical" on their end to make it work.

Their versioning system is weird...but Siemens' system is also weird in a worse way. In their scheme, newer versions of the software can't be installed at the same time as older versions. If you open a project in a newer version, it converts it to the newer version and you can't connect online with the hardware without downloading from the project to the PLC, which opens a whole slew of cans of worms. Also, a license for an older version will not activate a newer version, so every time we got a machine with a newer version of software, we would have to buy a new set of licenses, or subscribe to their update service, which we finally had to do last year when they started releasing a new version of Portal every year.

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