Pierre

Of course but there is times when you have no choice. Like when troubleshooting or adjusting or testing products or just going on coffe breack.

When IN the software press F1 for help. Its limited but will give you some shortcuts.

Maybee a bit Of Topic but what did you guys do to supply power to your E150. I have used a few E150ET in the past and they don't come with there power supply. It is recommended that we use a 5 Volts supply but the unit just won't work. I have used a 6.4 Volts supply and reduce the brightness with the adjusting screw in the back of the HMI casing. What was your solutions?

That makes a lot of sense. Injuries are not always a results of idiots operators. What messages are transmitted from top to bottom in particular industries sometimes results in someone loseing a member. I have installed some systems which where operated by a single operator and the length of the production line was about 100 feet. When I revisited this place they had replaced ALL my Push-Pull type EM push button with momentary ones. There reason was that the operator had to walk to each EM PB to release them when he wanted to start the line. Wow! What a waste of time! So he would be at his post and Start the line. The message here was what? One of the thing I tought was that at this place there EM-PBs where used as Stop signal. That was why they had to re-Start them line often. Is this a good enough reason? No so. Sometimes there is a mechanic working on the line. Maybee under a conveyor...

Ethernet implies that the station are way far apart! Don't it? MX-Components is a software that will supplie you whit add-ins fo Vb, Activex and other programming softwares. Specificaly it will deal with the "communication" part of it. So you can make yourself an app. wich polls Station !1 and send some stuff to Station 2 based on a certain logic. Yes you can do it this way but it would be easyer to just use a blackbox converting your local serial device to an ethernet link and "make" the PLCs talk with eachother.

Easyest way is to hardwire them together. Use 4 in and 4 out of each and you can have hundreds of messages going back and fort. You can have a hierarchy of message to handle and stop or start on with the other.

On the question of E-Stop failling You better darn be ready for it to fail!!!!! Look at how it is built. You have a NC contact block screwed or clipped to the back side of the operator (in this case a mushroom PB). Hold only the contact block in your hand when its not installed. Its contact are closed. Soooo the juice goes through. Imagine that you have your hand inside the machine and this clip or screw get loose. You are dead! This is why you need a reset circuit so any reset is intentional. I have experience of a coworker (operator) who lost 2 fingers cleaning the exit of a screw conveyor. The button failed, the system started, he had his hand like hamberger meat. That was before I went into PLC programming but I still remember.

I guess you don't need anything speedy and you are logging the data in D and DM memory area. Soooo. A dirty way to do this would be to use 2 serial ports some mechanical relays and some of the brands specific converters. Built yourself a small VB app or even better use a free SCADA Demo package to drive them links (Paragon TNT works for 3 hours at a time and Citech for 30 minutes), wich is long enough for your douwnload. Get the picture?

To begin in the drawing of electrical/automation system you only need basic knowledge. Lines, circles, rectangles, squares and text is enough to get you going. After you are familiar with it you can use some examples and menus. Sorry there is no shortcuts. You have to practice. The help files are very good in this software. Use them. Once you are drawings schematices then you can use add-ons and libraries. You will know why using them and why not. You must first screw-up a few times before you begin to understand the architecture of a schematic and how not to do it in CAD softwares. Pratice, practice practice. Tutorials that lead you to 3D is not good for you. Be carefull. Your time is important.

Have a look at manual number JY992D69901 from Mitsu. It deals with comms and has a few examples.

Chad - This house was built only on the esthetic value of the design. But the design comes from the Mediteranée. It is in no way suited for North America. Once this is said we still have to deal with it. Originaly the owner/builder of the house was to use it only in summer and the heating was sufficient. So when my friend bought the house he did not have a set of electrical bills to judge of this situation. He is not concern about having been fooled cause this is not the case. Just the view is enough to make one appreciate the location and confort. This outweights any heating bill. BUT... this is not to say that we won't do anything about it. We have power and heat in sufficiant amount to be in the confort zone. The control is whats missing. And it need a pretty smart control system.

Hi guys. A very good friend of myne has this house. Its located on a hill crest, facing west, looking down on a 20 mile long (2 miles wide) lake. Ho! What a view. He tells me its a mediteranean design. 4 feet cement basement. Open spaces. West side wall are full of real big windows. His problem is heating. In winter his electrical heating bill is more than twice has much has myne The heating is all done through big BUH heaters in the basement. The basement is isolated on all sides except the ceiling which is the floor of the house. The floor heats up and ventillation circulates the floor warmth around the house. When the sun is up during the day and the heat gets in, the heaters stop. Around 4 o'clock when the sun sets the house starts to be cool. By the time the heaters do there job and the ceramic/cement floor gets hot enough to heat the rest of the house they are freezing in there. Around midnight it get so hot that they almost have to open windows. Cycle time is at the least very slow. We have no other controls but the thermostats in the main floor area. When its windy (in winter of course) he needs some heat but if clouds get in the way of the sun rays he needs a lot of heat. We can install a lot of sensors and logics but how would you guys suggest we attack this challenge.

The situation requires more judgement. I use to thinck that if a human being can control it by hand a PLC can certainly do it for him. But now this system is very hard to control even by hand. We stand in the house and look outside. Sunny. The temp. is minus 10 and there is no wind. We set the room temp to 24. Underground the heaters kick in and the basement temp. raises to 90C. By the time the room temp rises 1 degree we almost cannot walk on the floor. So we need to have a lower heating space temperature. Since the differential is less the exchange is also lessen. So if we want smnoother cycles we make them even longer. We need for this thing to work a lot of sensors. Outside air. temp. + chill factor + wind velocity + room temp + air space temp + heat exchange rate. Or is there a simpler smarter way to do this? We have all PLC + HMI + power sources we can use its only to use then in an elegent way. And of course increase the comfort.

Some guys are way smarter than me. One such techy discovered that when you use a password locking schem in many PLCs there is an exchange of data (read password) between the software and the hardware AND it is the hardware that sends the password for the software to verify. What it means is that your software initiates a verification of the password which has been writen in a PLC memory area. The PLC send the password to the software application running in your PC/Laptop and this is where the match is verified. You only need to snoop the com port to find it. To do so, you will need to practice a little but its not that hard to do. I for one would never have found this. But then again I would not need to. Brute force is less artistic but still works.

You read the nameplate on the load!

I recall having a Syswin.ini file under W95. You could see in it a line where Demo mode=1 had to be writen to Demo mode=0 before you could have anything else once you've had installed it in demo mode. So check if this is the case with this ME (crapy) version of Windows.

Your question is a good one and your electrical knowledge is OK. Once you read the books on electricity you end up with these type of questions. Now for the reality. It is best practice to allways balance the loads on any multiple phase circuits. Why? Since this balancing of the loads implies that these loads are working on a single phase and if the voltage level is great enough nobody really cares then again why even needing a good balance? BUT ...Next week imagine that you connect a 3 phase motor to this circuit. The operation of your motor could be jeopardized by this imbalance. A 5% drop in voltage could lower the tork by 25%. ...The transformer will have a temperature raise due to the imbalance. Best practices are not always VERY IMPORTANT they give you some limits to prevent a bigger problem in the futur. IF you have a set of lights on one phase and heaters on the next and the light go on and the heater gives out enough heat then you don't have a real problem. To balance the phases there is no real magic. Parse your load a bit more or get a tranformer with taps enabling you to boost up the phases one by one. If you connect a load with specs saying that you need to supply from 100 to 125 volts to it and on this phase you have 110 compare to the other 2 with 117 then you don't have a problem. Just remember that the next load will be used to redress the imbalance.

Having been pissed-off, late at night in a Texas motel room, getting a message telling me that I needed to call Mitsu to get an autorisation number for there new Version that I was so dumb to install there... away from my desktop and from home... I decided to play around with there software. First, there new version comes with this "Melsec Environment" crap. And up to now I did not need it. I have installed version 7.11, the last one without this M-E thing and AFTER thiis have installed the environement. Then I install the new versions of Simulator and some of there new Configurators. They all work OK. Windows XP / 95 / 2K So here it is. What is really new about these version is "Version control" I've managed to bypass that simply. Hoping it lasts. What I have is version 7.11 for Gx, Environement that came with version 8, Configurators and Simulators compatiibility to and only to version 8 And Jim, wait till you use there Q-Serial module which can page, fax , GSM link and be a simple com port. If you ever use there Serial card Configurator be prepare to cry like baby. I know cause I did. They have only one thing going for them... the darn best hardware in the world. (only Modicon Quantum can come close)

I personnaly always leave it in Monitori mode so when I connect to change something "on-line" it does not give me a message telling me it has to be in monitor mode to do this. I kind'a wonder why the RUN mode even exists. I have never seen any difference between Run and Monitor except for the on-line edit enabling of the monitor mode.

Perhaps the booting PLC is seing you connexion as if you had attached a programming therminal to it so it boots in programming mode. Can you not divert or delay the communication so the PLC can boot completely BEFORE the com is established. Something like trying once every minute only when you have no links.

Phase balancing is not an issue if there is no big difference or if not motors are effected by it. You take your DVM and if the difference is little, don't even mention it. My 2 cents.

This function MUST also have been selected when you first installed th GX software. If it was not then no ways but re-installing it will help you.

For a single output use 2 timers. One self latches to give you an OFF time and the next one triggered by this first one will give you the ON time.

Having done a few control system in the area of "medical air" supply for work inside vessels O allways tend to have 2 lights for the "emergency" situations. For a good or OK call, Green and-not Red For a failed system, Red and-not Green This way it cannot be missed even if all light are burned. The signal comes from a single 1P2P relay. It could be overkill but what's the cost of one pilot light?