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.