Duffanator

Hey Panic, We use Maple Systems screens all the time and I always have them communicate at 19.2. Are you getting an error if you try and select that speed, or does it just not communicate? Make sure you have the newest version of the EZWare 500 program (Should be version 2.7.3) They make a lot of driver changes and this problem might be solved if you're using an old version. I always use the programing port of the PLC to communicate with the touch screen (unless it's an A series then you need a serial communication card) but the FX2's and FX3's use the programming port with no problems. Should be set to RS-485 4Wire in the system parameters screen on the HMI software. Hope that helps some!

Hey all, I have a question on something I can't figure out. I know there is probably an easy way to do this but I can't get it to work correctly. I have a q-series PLC that is running with a remote SCADA program (Citect) that is gathering information, doing some statistical analysis and then writing the statistics to D registers in the PLC. I would like to display on the touch screen, that is also connected to the PLC, wether or not the Citect connection via Ethernet is still connected or the connection has been dropped. I tried having Citect cycle an M contact every 20 seconds or so and using timers in the PLC to see if the M contact was cycling but I was running into problems with it not always working. Does anyone have any ideas for this or have a different way of doing it? Thanks!

Yeah, happens to me too I used your sample code and it worked great, I just had to write some code in the Citect program and it worked the first time (yay!) Thanks a lot, you guys are the best!

Cool, thanks for the info. That's what I was trying to accomplish but I was having a brain fart! Much appreciated!

This is true, even if a company goes bankrupt they can still legally hold the intellectual property rights to anything (such as PLC programs). http://library.findlaw.com/2001/Dec/19/130128.html Best to find out as soon as possible with new machinery or systems if you can have a backup program or are able to do it yourself. We've run into this problem once or twice and also have been screwed by it, so I feel for you 'cuz I've been there but the law is the law.

I have just recently used a Q-series temperature control module to control 3 PID loops and I was quite impressed with how well it works as well as how easy it was to program (if you use the configurator there is almost no programing needed). I'm not sure if the modules for the FX3U are similar, I've never used them, but if they are then I would recommend them. Even the autotune works well with those temperature control modules. It does require some programing to use the autotune function but it's not very much and the manual explains it pretty well.

Hey all, I had just recently started using the Q-series PLC and for the most part I really like it, it is far superior to the A-series and has many more cool options to play with. The only thing I don't like is that there seems to be no good way of finding information out without having to sort through 100's of PDF files trying to find one simple answer. Most of the stuff I figured out on my own but there are some things I'm still not sure of and I was hoping someone here would know the answer to some or all of my questions. 1) How does the scanning change if your running multiple programs? Does the CPU scan all the programs simutaniously or does it scan one then the next then the next etc.... I would like to know if it's faster to write one big program, many little programs or if it makes no difference at all. 2) I was playing with the fixed scan time option for different programs but when I set a program to scan say at 1 second intervals it only runs once and then never runs again. Is there something I'm missing with this? I don't see any other options so I'm kind of confused with that. 3) (This I can find absolutly no information for) How do you use the high speed interupt programs, I could really use this if I could figure out how it works I can't figure out how to set it up or how to implement it when it is set up. 4) (This is more specific question) I'm running a fairly high speed machine with a Q-series and it needs to pick up registration marks on printed film with a photoeye as the film is running through the machine. This works fine until I connected Citect to the PLC to gather statistical information from the PLC. Now it misses the registration mark sometimes. Citect is only polling the PLC every .250 seconds how much does it slow the scan time when you are requesting I/O and D register information from an HMI or remote monitoring software such as Citect? I would think this would be negligable but apparently it makes a difference. 5) When using function blocks written in Structured Text does it constantly scan the function blocks or wait until it gets to the function block in the program to scan through it? Also is structured text slower, faster or the same scan time speed? I really like the function block feature but if it's slowing down the scan time I'd rather have the time than the convenience. If anyone knows the answer to some or all of these questions your help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!

Well, it's not something that is killing my program it was more of a "This looks neat, how do I make it work?" kind of thing. I have one program that just sends errors through e-mail but that doesn't have to scan every time so I wanted to have it scan every second. There's a good posibility that it will have next to no effect on the actual scan time but I wanted to try it any way. The problem was that even when I set it up to run every second then it didn't run at all. It's not so much that I need to have it that way but more of I was trying it and it wasn't working. Just wondering what needs to be done to make it work. Also the 100's of PDF files was an exaggeration, it's just frustrating when you have to wade through a PDF for something that should be in a help file. I don't get to spend my whole day writting PLC programs I have lots of other stuff I have to do at work too so spending half my time trying to find a simple answer in a PDF or constantly calling Mitsubishi support isn't something I'm very fond of. Just my opinion!

I'm sure this has been mentioned before but they really need to do something with the "help" files. Especially when trying new things or starting on a new style PLC this is invaluable. I just started working with Opto 22 and Citect and they have awesome help files that are easy to navigate and you can find what your looking for fast without having to surf the internet for an hour or read through 30 manuals on GX Developer. It should spell out each function for ladder logic, how to use it in structured text, what each parameter setting does and how to use it and what every option is for the special function cards. It's a lot of work for them yes, but it's amazing how much it speeds up development time. I can't tell you how much time I've wasted looking for answers for stupid little stuff that should be just a help file search away.

Cool, thanks for the info. I tried 1 second refresh time and it didn't work very well with the trending I'm doing. I wanted to trend the vacuum level of the machine and it's so quick that I wouldn't get an accurate trend with 1 second refresh. I'll post my program so you can take a look at the settings. I'm always looking for ways to make things better so if anyone has any ideas or helpfull hints that would be great. I appreciate the feedback, thanks! SLM_Tiromat.zip

Ok, I am including the program. SLM_Tiromat.zip

Hey all, I was wondering if anyone could be of any assistance here. I am trying to use the e-mail function of the Qj71E71-100 Ethernet card with a Qo2H PLC but am not having any luck. I set up everything the way I think it should be set up and wrote a program to send a test E-mail when a M contact is made, but everytime the module goes to send the e-mail I get an C103 Error, which is a DNS Setting error. I checked with our network administrator and he confirmed that the two DNS IP addresses I have are correct so I'm not sure why I keep getting this error. If I put the IP address of the e-mail server in I get a different error, I get a C120 error, which is a "Can not open STMP server" error. I checked again with our network administrator and confirmed that the SMTP port on the mail server is 25 and I also am able to ping the mail server both by IP address and DNS name from the QJ71E71 card. I'm at a loss as to what is going on since I can ping everything and all the settings look correct. Any help would be much appreciated, thank you!

Hey all, I'm not very familiar with Allen-Bradley, I'm mostly involved with Mitsubishi. We refer to AB as "The Dark Side" but I do have a question: We have a machine at our plant that uses a Control Logix 1756-L61 processor. We have a spare CPU that had revision 1.9 firmware in it. I put the spare CPU in the machine and flashed it with what I thought was the newest version firmware (16.2) and tried to download the program to it via flash card. However, instead of the program downloading to the CPU I get an error instead. RSLogix 5000 says that the problem is the version firmware in the flash card and the version firmware in the processor are not the same. I checked the version on the flash card and it is version 16.7. I put the old CPU in and checked the firmware version on that and it is 16.7. Where do you get firmware version 16.7? I can't find any kind of information anywhere about that version of firmware. Allen Bradley hasn't been very helpful so far so I thought I'd put the question out there and see if anyone here knew the answer. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks a lot!

Yeah, I've had experience "Bricking" things in the past *cough*Xbox*cough*, so I'm well aware of what happens when you're interupted while flashing any kind of firmware or BIOS. I appreciate the warning though, I'd rather not have a $1300 paper weight that looks like a Control Logix processor. Thank you everyone for the information, I appreciate it!

Thanks OkiePC, I downloaded the program to the controller with version 16.21 and then reprogrammed the flash card to that version and it worked fine. You were correct that version 16.21 is newer than 16.7, that is kind of annoying. I guess you're supposed to magically know to add a decimal place there. Thanks for the info, very helpful!

Didn't you ever know what was in your hot dogs?

Hey all, I was wondering if you could be of some help. I installed a A1SJ71E71 module on a A2SH PLC rack to communicate to a Citec computer. That is working but I also wanted to open up two more ports to get some scale data that I want to collect into the PLC. The scales transmit RS-232, so I got a Comtrol 4-port serial to Ethernet converter that supports socket transmition. Now here's the part that's making me pull my hair out. I wrote the PLC program to open up two ports (2000, and 2500) and I programmed the Comtrol to send any data that it gets out to those two ports. The Comtrol is connecting to the Ethernet card on the PLC because the buffer lights are lighting up, but no matter what I do I can't get any data from the Comtrol to the PLC. I am not getting any recieve buffer errors either. I'm not sure if I'm going about this the right way, I haven't really done any Ethernet programming before, it looks correct to me but I can't be sure. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

We have Citec at our plant and if it's the same thing that we use you should be able to pull the information out of the PLC via Ethernet or 232/422 and write that information into the Allen Bradley PLC's. Kind of like using the Citec as a third party in between the two different PLC's. This, of course, would require someone to program the Citec software (I'm not in charge of that where I work so I'm not sure how that works) but that is as easy an option as anything else.

Actually, I have made a cable before. The SC09 cable has a built in 232-422 converter build into the PLC end. All you have to do is make a regular serial cable and put a 422 converter on the end of it. It's way easier to actually have the cable... but you can make one if you need. here's a schematic of the cable. That should help some!

How many unidrives do you have daisy chained together? I've had a problem with 485 when too many things were connected in the line and the signal was getting dragged down. Also, are you using a terminating ressistor? I'm not sure but I think you have to use different value ressistors depending on how long the run is or how many slaves are in the line. Something to look into!

Man, dirt is old. Send it to where I work, all we do is buy obsolete equipment.

Hey all, I've got a question about ASCII conversion. I have data going into several D registers and I want to convert it from ASCII to decimal. The problem I have is the way that it is set up in the PLC. I am pulling some weight data out of an ethernet card and putting it into some D registers in the PLC. The data syntax is: Scale# Date Time Weight ex: 02 1/6/2008 06:20:50 26.14 The problem is that when I pull the data out and put it into D registers it breaks it up so that there are 2 ASCII characters in each D register. I want to convert the weight so that it is just a 4 digit number in one D register with no decimal point. I am not sure how to break it up so that I can convert the ASCII characters to decimal and then add them together to make one number. I also can't figure out how to get rid of the space character and the decimal character without having hundreds of steps of math functions. This is what I am getting: D54 - SP,2 (ASCII) D55 - 6,. (ASCII) D56 - 1,4 (ASCII) And this is what I want: D?? - 2614 (Decimal) Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

I've just used one of these for a project I was working on and they are very nice to work with. The major benifit being you can broadcast to more that just your PLC, you can do serial tunneling through your network to other devices as well. I would recommend a Comtrol device if you are think of expanding your communications in the future.

I tried this too and it works as well, interesting way of doing it and something I wouldn't have thought of. Thanks for the info!

It is always ##.##, the max weight is around 30 pounds.