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JohnDruzianic

Festo FPC 103 plc

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Client has lost the back-up programme for this PLC. The programming software ( FST4.0) requires that this back-up be resident on the lap-top before it "reads" the programme out of the plc. An upload of the programme is not permitted (?) with this type of plc unless a back up is installed on the laptop. Tis is a "catch-22" situation. Is there a way out apart from a new plc and an expensive rewrite. I do have a paper print-out of the progarmme. Help please.

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Try to contact Festo. I had a problem like this and they had a procedure to recover the program.

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Same old Festo. ´They didnt really thought on that people actually was going to use their stuff so its useability has much to ask. Personally I got rid of all festo-stuff when I came to the company I work in now (A total of 6plc´s have been replaced) not because they where old but just because that they just dont keep up with the competition today. Feels like they are about 10 years behind in some matters... Sorry about the "attack" against festo in this post but in my experience with their plc-products and their plc-support I could just recommend everyone to not use their products. Their programming-software FST doesnt work properly and hangs up frecuently and their plc´s act "strange" and actually doesnt follow the ladder-program as it should. After discussing with support that couldnt understand what was wrong they tried to fix the problem and they failed on it. This was ridiciolus because what that brand new PLC was supposed to do was to drive one servounit betwen 2 positions and one servounit a relative position ahead. And to do this it had simple I/O´s to drive the units with (enabled bit, drive bit, positions bit and positionreached input) It failed on doing this in a simple step-program. After the support was talking about strange programming and other stuff I took my old omron C20H (early 90´s) and did the exact same ladder-program and put it in the same place as the FESTO CPX where before. It worked perfectly at once. When the festo had the same program it sometimes didnt move the servo-unit and sometimes did in some sort of strange random pattern and whatever criteas I tried to add to make it not to it sure kept on in the same way. I think that its a securitydanger to have a plc that can ignore instructions and just go on and I did double and triple-check that it was the right program in the plc. What if it skipped security breaches and such?? I have never worked with a PLC-system with such a low quality and lack insecurity before and its strange that they in the competition today at all can sell products. When we finally had decided to replace all our Festo products and send back the new one the support actually confessed that they have a problem with their software and that its another company that does it for them. To have that kind of problem with a software at version 4 they really should take their products back and refund which they by the way didnt do 100% to us... Edited by David Larsson

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