HELLO FRIENDS,

IAM NOT QUITE FAMILIAR WITH ALLEN BRADELY PLC'S. IS THERE ANY COMMON PLC PROGRAMMING SOFTWARE AVAILABLE FROM ALLEN BRADELY FOR ALL THEIR TYPES OF PLC'S AND IF SO PLEASE TELL ME THE SAME OR HELP ME BY MENTIONING THE TYPES OF SOFTWARES REQUIRED AND THE CORRESPONDING PLC IT SUPPORTS.

I also heard that the Allen Bradely software requires hardware lock.Is it true.Does any body has the drawing of the same.

Thanks and regards,
CHANDRU

Hi

Rslogix 5 -- PLC platform
Rslogix500-- SLC & micrologix platform
Rslogix5000- Logix platform

All above software requires software activation that you need to purchase

Some demo sofware also available

http://www.rockwellautomation.com/rockwell...x5000/demo.html

I believe software is now remotely activated. RSLogix used to come with a floppy disk with a "key" on it that you would have to either have in your floppy drive, or use the transfer utility to keep it on a hard drive. This was easily circumvented, however, by simply making an image copy of the floppy disk and duplicating the licenses.

I have been using the OEM Toolkit for about a year and it is still using a time dated Master Disk. If you have other software licenses using hte disk the newer CD/DVD disks can be used to load the software and if you have an old disk you can use the software.

For OEM's I highly recommend the Toolkit, it has a ton of software to use and what surprised me was that you sometimes are unaware of what you need to configure some of the newer PLC Systems. i.e. RSNetworx for DeviceNet (RIO) IIRC. We built a system with CLX and one remote. The RIO was not as with the old systems. Learning on the fly sometimes is fun.

Where I work at we have the current updated version of Rockwell software and it came with a master disk to activate the software but when you install certain features it warns you that future versions of the software will have to be activated through factory talk which is their online activation feature.

They've been warning people about that for several years :) It has been an option for activating software for a while now, I think they might be getting pretty close to making it the only option.

CHANDRU,

If you're company doesn't have any PLC's and you are going to be putting in your first one I would recomend that you DON'T use AB PLC's at all.

I've been programing AB's for about 15 years now and its been VERY costly for everycompany that I've worked for.

You almost need a liscence for each PLC type!! The cost is too high for the software and hardware in my opinion.

There are a lot of other PLC's that are just as reliable that can do the job such as Keyence, Automation direct, CTC, Mitsubishi, and much more. There are also company's that sell PC I/O boards with Ladder logix software INCLUDED you just have to know some VB.Net or VC.Net.

Besides AB PLC's stay aways from Omron, and Siemens.

Hi Chandru,

Why blame Allen Bradley alone? at least their software is simple to learn and their communication drivers and protocols are robust. For exmple, to people unfamiliar with this art, it is intimidating use the Uni-Telway drivers of Modicon-Telemecanique and they are not very cheap either.There, are in addition, many hardware and software versions, which are not always compatible. Also changes in the Windows OS versions, often render software which you pay for, useless without warning!. Other kinds of problems are found with versions of HMI, its software and also cables, especially USB cables. However, unravelling these version conflicts, unpleasant as they may seem, do provide me a certain portion of livelihood.

I work for a Schneider system house and I've seen a lot of these issues. Ideally, we should all be using a high level language editor common to all PLCs but as the processors inside different PLCs are different, It is a long road there. The promise of Java for example as a platform independent programming language was not to live very long a decade ago. Now that Dot Net attempts to do the same thing, at least in the PC world, that hope is still there.

My own view of the future is that PLCs will have all the features of powerful parallel multiprocessor some day and in the near future, we should see much more object orientation in the PLC world as well. As it is web-servers are being built into PLCs and PACs are encroaching on to PLC turf. And thus the day when we can use a universal program editor for all PLCs, may yet come to pass sooner than later.

Regards, best wishes,

Raj S. Iyer