Joe E.

Look at P034 (Minimum Freq) and P035 (Maximum Freq).

It's not enough for both to be on the same network. They have to both speak the same language. In this case, the ML1400 and L24ER can natively talk together using a form of AB's Ethernet/IP while the S7-200 probably uses Profinet. You may be able to try to use Modbus as a common language between them. I've seen system OBs in the S7-300 world for Modbus but I don't know if they will work with an S7-200 or how difficult it would be to implement (I've never used Modbus). To get data between AB and Siemens in the past, I've used a Prosoft gateway module and a Red Lion HMI or Data Station. The Red Lion was actually cheaper and much simpler to use.

I also tend to "roll-my-own" alarm handling as well. At my current location, the OEMs have tended to use the built-in alarm functionality for the HMIs, which I generally dislike. Especially with the PV+ and Siemens MP/Comfort HMIs. I'm in the process of migrating an old PV+ to a C-More HMI now. It's been a LONG time since I used one of these (over a decade) so I'm having to re-learn it, but so far it's been far more straightforward and intuitive than the PV+ was.

I've seen bad things with remote activations too. I have mine hosted to my host PC with FT Activation Manager on the VMs pointed to the host. No issues with speed at all. I'm not using SE or emulate, though. Just RSLogix 500/5000, Studio 5000, and FT View Studio for ME. At a previous location, we had to share a couple of licenses so we hosted them on a PC that we could all ping through the network. It mostly worked, but I did see some opening time issues. I found this AB KB article that discusses some activation and firewall issues (access level: everyone): https://rockwellautomation.custhelp.com/app/answers/answer_view/a_id/36198  

I threw together a quick RSLogix 5000 project at v20 with an -L61 and an -EN2T. The 1719 I/O is not an option in the "select module type" dialog box.

Not really. Or, at least, not easily. The ML series isn't designed to handle I/O peripherals over Ethernet/IP. All you could do is set up some MSG instructions to communicate with the valve bank. That's going to be a really daunting task, basically building your own communications driver from scratch. SMC may be able to help you with that. I set up a similar valve bank to communicate with a CompactLogix and it was very straightforward and simple with minimal help from SMC to get it going, but the ML is a different beast.

Like Crossbow said, there may be a service pack for v14 that you need to install. Contact Siemens Tech Support about that. If that's not it...good luck.... At a previous location, I encountered a similar firmware issue with Sinamics drives in Simatic Manager. Because we had a few S7-315T processors, we had to install S7 Technology instead of Starter. If you uploaded out of a PLC, the software would just assign the newest firmware version it supports to any Sinamics objects, regardless of what they were in the field. It then wouldn't connect to the drives until you flashed the drives' firmware to the newer version. The only way we were able to successfully connect to those drives was to have a virtual machine with an older version of S7-Technology installed and create an empty project with whatever version of the firmware was actually in the drive, then upload. We then had to maintain two Simatic Manager projects for that machine with a note to open the drive project with a particular virtual machine only or it would convert it and you couldn't go online any more. By the time I left, I was maintaining 5 virtual machines each on 6 different laptops just for the different versions of S7-Tech and Portal we had to support. The answer from Siemens tech support was "just upgrade everything to the latest and don't make any mistakes". When we asked for Siemens to help us reconcile some of that, they said they could help us, but it would cost a lot and theyweren't responsible for any extra downtime for when things didn't work out perfectly. By the way, I experimented with another virtual machine with Starter instead of S7-Tech with similar weird results. We had 3 machines with "T" processors that were all 3 from the same builder and were each at a different version of S7-Technology. We briefly had a 4th machine that was at a 4th version. Sadly, efforts to have them come in the same were fruitless. Sigh... Again, good luck...

I don't know that I would jump to that conclusion quite so quickly. They're only available on the newer family of CompactLogix and L8x ControlLogix PLCs, of which we have none. If I wanted to test them, I couldn't because I don't have hardware available.

So, I've encountered this before but couldn't remember the fix. I found this tech note (access level: TechConnect): https://rockwellautomation.custhelp.com/app/answers/answer_view/a_id/808471/loc/en_US#__highlight Basically, the outline shows up when there's an invalid tag name or an expression in the animation dialog that the PV can't analyze at runtime. As an example, I had an object that I didn't want to show up (it was a placeholder for the future), so I set the visibility expression to "False" and got the outline. I changed it to "0" and the outline went away.

It would also be nice if the MAC ID label was visible while the module is installed instead of on the side where you have to pull it out of the chassis... I've encountered that issue a bunch.

Is it a Panasonic PLC? If it's an AB PLC, you'll need to contact your local AB distributor to buy the software, depending on which PLC it actually is.

Ok. I've never used (or heard of..) that drive, but its manual should show its analog input terminals. A quick Google seems to say that it's a Control Techniques drive but the manual download links I found don't work. Do you have a copy of the manual?

The Analog output power is produced internally to the module. You would connect the module's COM terminal to the drive's analog common and the chosen output to the drive's input. What kind of drive is it? Are you using a voltage or mA signal?

Whatever is going on, connect to the PLC before resetting the fault next time so you can see the fault codes. That will help diagnose the actual issue.

Hehe, I hear ya. You can have 5 (or probably 10, just to allow for future expansion) rectangles. The animation functions can be used to control the width, height,position, rotation, and visibility of each rectangle. In the animation controls, you can use either just a PLC tag or a math expression that can use a tag. You can also add an offset value, but I remember running into issues trying to get that to work right. If you're using a 5000 class PLC, I would probably start with a UDT called "Layer_Data" or some such that contains registers for each parameter. Box width, height, box #1 X-position, box #1 Y-position, box #1 rotation, etc. Maybe a second UDT called "Box_Pattern" that embeds an array of the Layer_Data type with one element for each layer of the pallet to account for stack pattern changes. You could then create an array of the Box_Pattern UDT with one element for each box pattern. The HMI recipe for each part could then refer to the box pattern. A 500-class PLC will be more challenging but still do-able. You will have to be really careful with your indirect addressing. I guess you could also use the built-in recipe function of the HMI, but I've never used it on the PV+ so that probably wouldn't be my first line of attack. Just some random thoughts....

Bob's first question is relevant here... Normally, a power cycle isn't enough to dump the program. Newer models have super-caps while older ones have batteries. If the battery is dead, a power cycle that's "more than brief" will cause it to lose its program. Other than that, the only times I've seen a PLC "randomly" lose its program is when there's a power supply problem. Either the rack-mount power supply is getting flaky, there's a lot of noise on the line, the chassis/backplane is getting flaky, etc. I've seen that mostly with SLC 500 systems (SLC 5/0x) but it can happen with other models too.

Is this a 3D image or 2D? If you're just showing an overhead view of the top layer, you only need enough objects to show the topmost layer. In your case, that would be 5. You can use animation to control the size, position, visibility, and rotation of each object. The values for the animations can be handled in the PLC, especially if the boxes are always loaded in the same order on each layer. Would be a little cumbersome, but once you have it set up for one recipe, the rest should be fairly straightforward, though kinda tedious. A lot less tedious, though, than trying to manage all those images.

alan_505's suggestion will definitely work. If you have constant-length numbers, also consider adding a string object containing "%" next to the numeric display. I've seen that done well too.

I'm going to let someone else chime in since I've never dealt with any of those option modules...but...there's....a lot going on there. That's an Ethernet PLC-5 PLC communicating via: 1)  Both built-in DH+/RIO channels 2)  An add-on DH+/RIO channel (Comms module) 3)  Built-in Ethernet port 4)  Built-in serial port 5)  Basic module serial port 6)  Serial port?? on the Comms module 7)  OMNII-Comm module That's a lot of communicating. Do you have access to the RSLogix 5 file for the PLC?  

I would not have suspected that at first. Definitely good to know.

Hmmmm....so I created an empty project for a MicroLogix 1100. I wonder how hard it would be to build your own FIFO stack.... How much precision do you need your flow numbers to have? Can you round it to the nearest gallon? Or to the nearest 1000 gallons?

PLCMentor is right. To get greater than 256 elements, you'll need to use more than one file. The PLC5 could have larger files, but the SLC and MicroLogix only go up to 256 elements, even the newer ML1400.

In the PLC2 and SLC150 worlds (both using old DOS software), I would often use the laptop and printout at the same time. With the printout, you can see the comments and descriptions of all of the addresses on the rung at once instead of one instruction at a time in the software. The search function in the software was pretty painful to use, too. With the PLC5 and newer, I only used the printout when there wasn't a PC available.

The newer families of AB CompactLogix (5370-series and newer) and ControlLogix (1756-L7x and newer) have super capacitors and non-volatile memory to retain programs instead of batteries. You need Studio 5000 to program them. If you're at v24 or newer, symbols and comments can be stored in the PLC (memory space permitting) so you can walk up to the machine cold and upload everything you need from the machine. The Siemens S7-300 PLCs that I used to work with also don't use a battery. They have a special (and EXPENSIVE) SD card that you can swap in when replacing the CPU as long as the CPU is the same model. You do NOT, however, get symbols and comments when you upload without a project file. Those are programmed with Step 7 for Simatic Manager (older) or Step 7 for TIA Portal (newer). Only some (maybe most, but definitely not all) S7-300s can be programmed in Portal. I haven't done much with other brands yet, so I can't speak to other options.

There are macros that run when a user logs in or logs out. You could use one of those to write the user name to a string tag in the PLC. Or do something similar. I *think* that will work, but I've never done it before.