FesterMT

Hi All, Just wondering if anyone here has any experience with automatically loading different programs to compactlogix. I am open to any suggestions. So far we have been putting sd card slots on the main panels since the extender cables are limited in length so the customer needed to swap sd cards on a tooling plate change out before powering up. One of our customers now would like to change the tooling plate and have the plc automatically load the proper program for it. We don't want to have multiple subroutines because sooner or later the plc memory will run out. We also have put smaller plc's on the tooling plates themselves to hold the specific programming for the tooling plate and handshake with main frame but this particular customer does not want this. I would like to know if anyone has done anything with wifi sd cards in CompactLogix or loading the program automatically from a pc to sd card and then switching the sd card to the plc via some kind of sd card switch before powering back up. Any advice is greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.  

Thanks for the reply, As you say the customer wants what the customer wants so they would like to assume that the machine frames can accommodate an infinite number of tooling plates. We do try to keep the base logic common for clarity however there could be any number of features on future tooling plates, the 2 we are finishing right now have degating on 1 and leaktesting on the other with devices like ethernet ip (IO link) multiport blocks, technifor pinstamp, Cincinnati leaktester and zebra printers but it's not uncommon for other tooling plates to use barcode scanners and cameras for quality inspections or servos so there could be a lot of aop's for other devices. We could just drop in a high powered processor with lot's of memory but cost is a big factor. On the surface this seemed like something that should be do-able so I am not sure if this is an AB thing or this would be just as hard with other brands but we use a lot of other brands so I am going to investigate. I haven't used recipes with Factory talk and didn't really think about that but it sounds like it would help with the memory consumption so I am going to consider that. We are also loading separate panelview programs with usb on the tooling plates so I am not sure if that will affect the use of recipes. Thanks again for the advice.