Steve Bailey

Sorry to burst your bubble, but its not the Genius handheld. The Genius handheld monitor (IC660HHM501) is a totally different animal. What you're looking for is the 90-30 handheld programmer (IC693PRG300). Back when the 90-30 first came out as a replacement for the Series One line, a lot of people were used to programming the S1 with a handheld, so they felt they needed to offer one for the 90-30. As a programming tool, it was woefully inadequate. It only showed one IL instruction at a time instead of showing a rung of ladder logic, and it had no provision for documentation or printing. Logicmaster software did infinitely more and cost less. However, there were two things you could do with the handheld that you couldn't do with software. One was the 'clear memory' procedure that I mentioned in my previous post. The other was that the handheld will set itself to the proper baud rate and parity when it attaches to the PLC. One other possibility, admittedly a long shot. Fanuc CNCs use the same handheld with a different keyboard mask. In the CNC world, the handheld is called a DPL/MDI. I'm not sure what the initials are supposed to mean, but if you happen to have machine tools with Fanuc CNC controllers, then your maintenance technicians might have the handheld for them. If you find one, I can point out which keys you need to press.

I received this private message, probably in response to my post on using a macro to crack an OEM password. Steve Bailey, jrwb4gbm has sent you this email from http://forums.mrplc.com/index.php. Hi,I know nothing about how to use macros. could you post how you used it on the 90-30 GE PLC or e-mail it to me?Thanks,Sid The ability to record macros is one of the underutilized features of Logicmaster that unfortunately didn't get ported over to VersaPro. Each Logicmaster folder can have have as many as ten macros recorded. You play them back by pressing ALT + 0 through ALT + 9. To record a macro, navigate to whatever Logicmaster screen you want to start from. Then hit ALT + t (think 'teach'). You will be prompted for which of the ten possible playback keys you want to use, and warned if a file already exists for the playback key you choose. Once that's done, simply press the keys to accomplish what you want to do. When you finish, hit ALT + q to end the recording session. I've used a macro as a quick and dirty method of getting PLC data into a spreadsheet. The macro is the sequence of keystrokes to jump to the register table display and do a screen dump to a text file. Then in Excel, I run another macro that reads the text file and drops the numeric data into spreadsheet cells.

Before you heat up the soldering iron, there is one more possibility. If you can lay your hands on a Hand-held programmer (IC693PRG300), connect it to the PLC, and hold down the 'CLR' and the 'M/T' keys while you power up the PLC. That will restore the unit to its out-of-the-box configuration.

With the flash memory on the Series 90 Micro, this could be tricky. I'm assuming that you don't care about the program that's in the unit. If that's true, then try disconnecting the battery and leaving it disconnected for several hours. That will clear everything in RAM, including the configuration. When you reapply power, it will read the program from flash memory, but maybe not the configuration. I'm pretty sure that passwords are stored in the configuration. The tricky part is that the unit can be set up to read its configuration from flash memory on power-up. BTW, if you can see the ladder logic, it's not an OEM password you're dealing with. With OEM passwords, all the user can see is the configuration. If all else fails, here's what I did when faced with the same problem. I created a macro with Logicmaster that tries all 65536 possible passwords. When you record a macro, the resulting file can be edited with notepad. I recorded the keystrokes for the first few permutations and then did a lot of cut and paste and find and replace operations with notepad.

ZMartin, I'm now registered as a MRPLC member. If you contact me via email or private message on this forum, I can probably help you out.