JJH

MrPLC Member
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Everything posted by JJH

  1. Hello group, Is it possible to copy the data string from a 1734-IB8S to a datatype such as an INT or DINT? When setting up the I/O with a Safety PLC, the discrete I/O is setup within the Safety Program but it's contained within the program itself. To utilize the same I/O points in a Continuous task requires inserting and remapping the I/O points to essentially the same tags. If the I/O data could be moved/copied to a global datatype within the Safety Program, it seems like it would reduce any redundancy in the Continuous tasks.   Anyone done anything like that/ Suggestions?
  2. Amazing information! I will look into this further and implement it into this particular project!
  3. Greetings and thanks for that info! Can you be more specific as to what sort of priority would be set up on a periodic task, as well as how the watchdog should be configured?
  4. I did reach out to Rockwell TechSupport and their response was that those objects can't be resized, I just wanted to see if anyone found a "work around" or otherwise that Rockwell often neglects to mention. I was going to see if there was a different object I could download and replace the current ones but haven't come across that yet. I could technically build my own larger keypad but that would take a little time and I'd have to restructure all the objects as their tags are pointing to the native keypad entries and the project has to be completed tomorrow, so just trying to find a shortcut.
  5. Greetings!I am using a PvP 7 4" screen which is sized at 480X272 pixels. The numeric keypad (and especially the alphanumeric keypad) are pretty small in trying to press the buttons for values.Does anyone know of a way to scale these keypads to a more user-friendly (larger) size?
  6. Greetings! I have had the extreme pleasure of being introduced to Rockwell's Win10-based PanelView Plus 7 and after having an extraordinarily lovely time wrestling with the way the new format has to be configured before even attempting to work with it, I have now had the delightful surprise to find out that MER files which I had been loading onto the screens in the WinCE/FTV 10 now don't seem to work well with the new format. I'm specifically speaking of using GoToDisplay navigation buttons on the HMI to traverse from one screen to another. Has anyone else had the benefit of this new added feature and if so, can I be educated on either how to fix it, or the best places to apply C4 to the screen to destroy it cmpletely?
  7. Yeah, not the greatest solution, we were just trying to go with something that was already built to workaround lead times on other devices but we may end up there, anyway.
  8. Hey group! I am working on a project that has a machine that forms cartons that will drop the cartons into a cleated conveyor after they are formed. The forming machine needs to be synchronized with the cleated conveyor so that the formed cartons will drop in between the cleats as they pass under the forming machine. So, in essence, the conveyor will be the master and the forming machine will be a slave to the conveyor and match its position accordingly. Initially, it was proposed that the conveyor utilize a CIP encoder so it could be set up as a motion axis, but the customer declined that option as they didn't care for using CIP encoders (can't really blame them!). So, a slightly cruder proposal of using two 1024 count encoders was proposed, which they accepted. However, your friendly programmer here isn't quite sure how to make that work! I think the basic concept is encoder following but but I can't seem to find anything online that really describes the actual process or logic for this. The RA Sample Code site doesn't seem to have anything on there but maybe I just haven't entered the right search keywords. The forming machine has the following notable components: 5069-L310ER 5069-HSC2xOB4 PowerFlex 525 drive 1024 count incremental encoder As noted, the idea is to have a 1024 count encoder mounted on the conveyor with some sort of ratio so that the counts will run the pitch of the cleats 508 mm). Some trickery will have to worked in to get them to sync at the right time but for the time being, I'm just looking for a method to do the encoder following and asking the group if anyone has some ideas, or better yet, a method, of how to accomplish that.
  9. Yes, all lead times on microprocessors, regardless if it's a PLC, a VFD, an ECR module for a car or a cell phone are seriously delayed. Some Rockwell devices are quoting 12 month lead times! I've seen a video of their current setup, it looks like it works so I'm not entirely sure why they want to change it. Most of the time, I ask alot of questions but I sort of committed to making this work, so I'm trying to find a resource to make it happen. I have found lots of articles about what "encoder followers" are, which is just wonderful, but I need logic, not a show-and-tell.
  10. They haven't been happy with having to work with Ethernet-based encoders and for me, I think the latency with Ethernet communications isn't the greatest solution for trying to sync motion or be accurate. Obviously you obtain data from a servo drive in that fashion, but all the feedback is held in the drive. I honestly haven't used the CIP encoders much so I could have a gross misconception there but I often cringe when an idea comes of of controlling critical data/positioning via Ethernet.
  11. That's an interesting thought, I could see if that would be an easy but effective solution. However the cleated conveyor has intermittent motion so it was thought the best idea would be to synch the two in order to keep things on track. The customer has a machine that is doing this but they are using a 0-10V speed reference from the drive system for the conveyor and they wanted to move away from that for some reason, possibly due to latency or something like that. 
  12. Hi there, I am trying to create an Add=On Instruction to help me manage some alarm conditions in my application. My AOI has one Boolean output that is used for messaging on the HMI, but I'd like to also have another output (Boolean or integer) that would be attached to o global parameter so that if any alarm is activated, it will create a master alarm that can be used for machine control, and possibly messaging. The reason for this is that I may have numerous alarms and I'm trying to avoid having to create a series chain of all those alarms to turn on a master alarm. My thought was that if I can get any alarm to make a global parameter go true, then I don't have to manage other bits if I delete or add an alarm block. I'm having trouble coming up with a way to create that output that I can have load a TRUE value into a global parameter, though.  I was trying to use an integer so that I could just load a '1' into the variable if any alarm goes off, and a master reset would reset the value to zero. But I'm apparently not setting up the AOI parameters just right. Has anyone got a suggestion of how I can do this? I can share my block if that would help, it's nothing special, just a way for me to condense alarming features and this one seems to be a little tricky. Thanks for your suggestions!
  13. Hi all,    Thanks for the suggestions! If I were doing some simple alarms, then I would just use the DINT suggestion, but the alarm block includes the features of a delay timer, if it should be a latching or not-latched type, and also a status bit so I can determine if the alarm is on, off, or disabled. It's a simple alarm block, but has some things to it that would make it extraneous to have numerous alarms with typical ladder logic.
  14. Hi there,

     

    Thanks for answering my thread regarding a screen capture for the PanelView screens.

    I was not very clear in my thread so to clarify a few things:

    This is in fact for the PanelView Plus screens. I'm using FavtoryTalk View 8.0 for the software to create and transfer the MER files to the screens after they're compiled.

    I wasn't aware that my colleague had actually made a PRINT button that when pressed, it uses an installed PDF print driver to save an image to a PDF file of whatever screen it's on. So, that part is sort of resolved.

    However, at this time when the button is pressed it saves the screen image to a default file name. In the event that multiple screen images would want to be captured, it would continually overwrite the file with the latest image. Not real handy.

    So, the next issue is to somehow create a typical "Save As" dialogue box through the PanelView so that the file could be renamed in the event of multiple screen captures. We're not sure how feasible that is to do with the PanelView Plus screens. It's sort of a Windows thing I would guess but perhaps a macro could be written to handle that.

    Also, while I've got your attention, the next part of this is for a user to insert a USB drive with an autorun.inf file that would open a batch file and copy anything with a .PDF extension over to the USB drive automatically. I've done some testing on that today with fair results but it definitely is not smoothed out. If you've ever run into anything like that before and have some suggestions or a solution, I'd appreciate hearing about it.

  15. Hello there, I would like to add a "Print" button to my PanelView HMI screens that will basically do a screen capture of the current screen the button is on and then have that file saved in some format ("JPG, PDF, etc). The file could either reside in the memory of the HMI, saved to a USB drive or SD card so that an operator could retrieve the image easily. Transmitting the image over Ethernet to a PC or server would be ideal but probably a bit out there for the applications that I usually create. A local store and retrieve process is fine for now. Anyone got any advice on how to make something like that happen? Is that even possible on PV 700 or 1000 HMI units? Many thanks in advance!
  16. Thanks to all, both of those are reasonable solutions to my question.
  17. I’ve got a quick question regarding programs that get loaded onto the PanelView Plus products. Let’s say I download a Runtime app from a PanelView, convert it into an .apa, and then need to recompile it into a Runtime app and downloaded it back to the HMI. Is there anyway, either through the PanelView or the program which I convert, to find out what its particular software compile version is? I’m trying to figure this out to put into a quick guide for myself and our company field service techs to avoid the pitfall of accidentally compiling a program with the wrong version. Any advice from the group is much appreciated!
  18. I have a button on my HMI that I only want visible under two conditions. One of them is a numerical value and the other is if a bit is on. English translation If Variable 1 = 0 OR BooleanBit is TRUE, then show the button I tried entering the expression in the button's Visibility parameter in Animation as such: {[Program]Variable} = 0 OR {[Program]} However, it does not work on both conditions. It will work if I just use one of them but not as shown above, even if the order is reversed. There must be a trick of how to write an expression that uses multiple values...... any suggestions?
  19. The CPT instruction worked but I had to offset it by a -1 because of how AB handles their variables (2**Variable-1). Thanks for the suggestion!
  20. Hey all, I've reviewed a number of threads regarding converting one data type to another and I have something I'm working on that I'm stumped on and haven't found an answer for yet. Without getting into the details, I need to get a DINT bit value from an entered decimal value. A user will enter in a whole number in an entry box and then it needs to get converted to the number of whatever bits that the DINT number holds. For instance: # Entered Variable Bit Value -----0------------------0 -----1------------------1 -----2------------------3 -----3------------------7 -----4-----------------15 etc... I'm looking for a fairly clean way to do this, with perhaps just two or three instruction blocks to handle it, if possible. I can provide a screenshot of the HMI and the logic (4 rungs) if necessary. Any suggestions or advice from the group would be greatly appreciated!