Tech Fred

Unfortunately, the solution to this type of an issue is a redesign of the software involved because the UI and Runtime are a single application. We had this problem with our products and still do not have them all redesigned. Our core KEPserverEX product to took almost 2 years. The cost of doing that is hard for many companies, even big ones like Rockwell, to swallow. It take many big customers complaining about to get the ball rolling.

What I have heard from most of my customers is that they will be avoiding Windows 8 like they did Vista. We have tested our server software on both and it works however, we will recommend that customers use Windows Server 2012 to run it and not Windows 8.

S:1/15 is the fist scan bit. See http://literature.rockwellautomation.com/idc/groups/literature/documents/rm/1762-rm001_-en-p.pdf#page=395.

It really depends upon the configuration of the hardware and the available resources but according to this article there is a hard limit of 16,777,214.

This is the most likely issue. We see it all of the time with new PC's.

The string is a HEX ASCII string basically HEX ASCII is taking the nibbles of a Hex data packet and transmitting thing in Human Readable form. I did a quick Google search and although the available documentation is limited I did find some good information on one of my Linked-In groups. There are 2 instructions to do this. They are STOD (String to DINT) or DTOS (Dint to string. You must first create an string data type(If it is not already in string form) and copy your data into the SINT's then assign a length to the string. ControlLogix string data is already in ASCII format. Look at your string tag and expand it. The data you are looking for is in "TestString.Data" which is an array of SINTs (SINT[82]). Expand this array and you will see each character in the string. The default "style" for viewing this data is ASCII. Chose something else and you will see the corresponding representation. For our example, assume the value of "test_string" is "Testing 1-2-3". Viewing the array in "HEX" mode yields test_string.DATA[0] = 16#54 test_string.DATA[1] = 16#65 test_string.DATA[2] = 16#73 test_string.DATA[3] = 16#74 test_string.DATA[4] = 16#69 test_string.DATA[5] = 16#6e test_string.DATA[6] = 16#67 and so forth The string functions mentioned previously convert a DINT to a string. For example DToS(54321) converts the single DINT to a series of concatenated ASCII characters ("5" & "4" & "3" & "2" & "1") SToD reverses the operation, converting a string (array of characters) into a single equivalent DINT. Hope this helps you out. Perhaps someone in this group can expand upon this if you have additional questions.

The string is a HEX ASCII string basically HEX ASCII is taking the nibbles of a Hex data packet and transmitting thing in Human Readable form. I did a quick Google search and although the available documentation is limited I did find some good information on one of my Linked-In groups. There are 2 instructions to do this. They are STOD (String to DINT) or DTOS (Dint to string. You must first create an string data type(If it is not already in string form) and copy your data into the SINT's then assign a length to the string. ControlLogix string data is already in ASCII format. Look at your string tag and expand it. The data you are looking for is in "TestString.Data" which is an array of SINTs (SINT[82]). Expand this array and you will see each character in the string. The default "style" for viewing this data is ASCII. Chose something else and you will see the corresponding representation. For our example, assume the value of "test_string" is "Testing 1-2-3". Viewing the array in "HEX" mode yields test_string.DATA[0] = 16#54 test_string.DATA[1] = 16#65 test_string.DATA[2] = 16#73 test_string.DATA[3] = 16#74 test_string.DATA[4] = 16#69 test_string.DATA[5] = 16#6e test_string.DATA[6] = 16#67 and so forth The string functions mentioned previously convert a DINT to a string. For example DToS(54321) converts the single DINT to a series of concatenated ASCII characters ("5" & "4" & "3" & "2" & "1") SToD reverses the operation, converting a string (array of characters) into a single equivalent DINT. Hope this helps you out. Perhaps someone in this group can expand upon this if you have additional questions.

The problem is that the the RSLinx Automation wrapper is compiled using a code stack that was not developed for interoperability with .Net. In the early days the OPC Foundation provided a code stack that went to all OPC Server manufacturers. It was up do each of us to compile this and ensure that it worked with our products. This was before the Foundation had the ability to maintain code with its own staff. Since that time most manufactures distribute the same automation wrapper. If you look at KEPServerEX V4 installs you will see that we installed a KEPDAAuto.dll and an OPCDAAuto.dll. The latter is the .Net compliant version. Feel free to download the KEPServerEX V5. If you install it with the Samples the Automatiion Wrapper will be installed and then you can use it in your new examples. We also provide new examples that use the .Net Interop as wel.

Well it is there and it works. NetDDE is gone. We have run into issue with Google Chrome running on a machine where an application is trying to do a DDE connection to a Microsoft product. Chrome blocks the connection. Connections the other way work fine. Nothing is impacting Intouch that I am aware of. As for hardware communications, Kepware's KEPServerEX V7 is Windows 7 compliant, can run on 32 bit and 64 bit OS's, has native support for FastDDE/Suitelink as well as OPC DA, AE, UA, and OPC .Net. I would get off DDE as soon as possible, it was obsolete 10 years ago.

It depends upon which version of RSView32 you are running. Legacy RSView32 you cannot do it. RSView32ME/SE you can or if you are using the newer FTViewME/SE. You also need to make sure that the version you are running on the desktop is compatible with the firmware version of the panel. Rockwell has several Articles that go over this as well as some PDF's that explain how to transfer the project via a link or compact flash card. It is not a quick process and the last document I saw was 10-15 pages long. I suggest you start there.

Try KEPServerEX V5. The server has drivers for all of the devices your are using and has a data logger plug-in that can be configured to log data,via ODBC, to Access, SQL, MySQL, or Oracle. All of those data bases can be opened and viewed in Excel. Fred Loveless Applications Manager Kepware Technologies http://www.kepware.com

The port restrictions are Fins protocol specific. If you multi-home the NIC and bind each channel to a different IP it is not going to impact performance. The impact will come if you are running applications that browse the network or connect to the internet. Those application will use all the IP's to find a connection. I did find a reference that said that performance may start to degrade after 15 IP addresses however it was related to an XP OS and a slow processor. Newer processors and more RAM will probably allow for more connections.

You can get Kepware for Wonderware form them which will run on Windows 7 platform or go with the latest KEPServerEX from Kepware. Via the Kepware Allen Bradley drivers you can access the DH+ network vial the AB KT and PKTX cards, the USB to DH+ adapters, and you might also check out the Datalink Technologies cards which can do Enacpsulated DF1 over Ethernet to DH+.

Simulate mode is an echo function using the group update rate to echo any changes made to a tag to other clients/groups monitoring that with the same update rate. There is now way to override the access writes of an item. Your options are as follows. 1. Use the Simulator driver to create a project that does not have to be set into simulation mode. You can use the same structure as you currently have. If you create a second device with the same device address you can create tags that are read.write access for the read only tags and change the data there, seeing it in other device. 2. Depending upon the driver you are using we may have a slave(RTU) version of the driver which you could configure on a second PC and use that to simulate a live device. Fred Loveless Applications Manager Kepware Technologies

This Adapter creates a virtual comm port. You connect to it via DF1 and it coverts the signal to DH+.

Check out Brodersen Systems (www.brodersensystems.com) out of Denmark. They have a line of controllers that are using Straton as the engine for the PLC. They have sold them extensively in Europe in the Water and Waste Water managment areas.

The product was bought out by GE and is not distibuted by them. You might find some archeved pages for it at archives.org.

Well, if you want to do it yourself you will need to know the protocol for the ML and make all the ruests and responses your self. At a minimum you will need a communicaitons driver. Kepware's AB Server suite can provide the communications for that. We also have a Datalogger plug-in that you can configure to log data to one or more tables in a database. Datalogger runs as a plug-in to the server so you do not need an external client applicaiton to read the data and then write it to the DB. http://www.kepware.com

I would disagree with that. I deal with quite a few people at AD and they are all very knowldgeable and easy to work with. I find a lot of bias in all the forums, usually based on frustration, and I tend to ignore it and base my opinion on my own experience. If you go by the volume of questions that I see, and I monitor several foums the fewest questions are about AD devices and software.

Purchase and OPC Server that will allow you to communicate with the device and then wite your own OPC code in VB. The cost of this depends upon what version of OPC you are using.

I am not sure the Twido has the ability to do all of that, speficially the e-mail. I would place a PC there, does not have to be high end, running an OPC server and then you can either create your ownOPC Cleint with and E-mail applicaiton in it or get a product like Win911(http://www.specterinstruments.com) which is designed to do just that. Win911 is an OPC Cleint and it can be configured to do allarm notifification upon multiple conditions.

When you are dynmically adding items to the any KEPware or relabled Kepware server you will get the defatult data type for any address unless you over ride it. In OPC you can do this failry easily. When doing a FastDDE or Suitelink connection connection you should append "@Float" to the address to tell the server you need it as a floate. For instance "v1400@Float" to add register v1400 as a floating point number. This is explained in the server help file under DDE addressing or Dynamic addressing depending upon which version you are using. Fred Loveless Applications Manager Kepware Technologies

It is a simple DDE connection. Create an AccessName. The Application name is Excel and the topic is the sheet name you want to get data from. the items in the tag database will be the cell names, i.e. R1C1, R2C2 and so on. Wonderware actually has some cood docuemtnation on this as well.

You should go to the OPC Foundation (http://www.opcfoundation.org) they have all the detailed infromation that you need and lists of all the participating OPC vendors. Basically, OPC is broken into 2 catagories, OPC Classic and OPC UA. OPC Classic is several different types. The most common is OPC DA(Data Access). OPC is a specification of a method of transfering data between applications using COM and DCOM. It is not a programming language though it just specifies how to use COM to accomplish this and it specifies the methods to be used. There are 2 types of OPC applications, servers and clients. Servers produice the data and clients consume the data. The servers acquirte the data from various sources like PLC's, PAC's, CNC's, Databases, etc. The clients take the data that is collected from the servers and can display it or log it or perform any number of tasks. Not all vendors of OPC Servers will support the same device connectivity buty you chould be able to connect almost any device using a combination of servers. OPC Classic includes OPC DA, OPC HDA(Historical Data Access), OPC AE (Alarms and Events), OPC Batch, OPC Security, OPC DX, and OPC XML-DA. OPC UA is the next generation of OPC, the UA stamds for Unified Archtitecture. It is based on Web services for data transfer so you are not longer troubled with the vagries of DCOM security. the nice thing is that it wraps the OPC Classic types so that people using those do not have to re-invent the wheel. Hopefully this anwers some of your questions. If you want to see if there are servers for connecting to your hardware check out our website, http://www.kepware.com.

Sebastian, typicaly people using KepserverEX with incouth use Suitelink to connect to it. In the server if you go to File|Project properties you should see a FastDDE/Suitlink tab. Make sure that it is enabled. You will see that the application name we provide for FastDDE/Suitelink is "server_runtime", that is what you will use in your access name. It is a local connections so you can leave the nodename blank. Once that is set then you need to be able to spcify a topic in the server we create a global topic of "_DDEDATA". If you use this topic you will have to use the fully qualified item name of each item in you Intouch tag name reference. i.e. <Channel Name>.<Device Name>.<Tag Name>. You can also create your own topics using the alias map. This is explained in detail in the server helpfile which is alwo the User manual. Fred Loveless Applications Manager Kepware Technologies http://www.kepware.com