RSLinx - Devicenet problem

[Sharkster 0]

I'm running RSNetworx7.0. When connecting to a scanner that has about 20 nodes on it, including 4 Mitsubishi VFD's, FR-E500 series with the FR-E5nd option, the drives will not apear when browsing. They are on the network and functioning fine; however, we cannot view them with RSNetworx. When you look at the scanners scanlist, it shows the 4 drives as "removed from configuration". This is on an SLC500 system with a 1747-sdn module. Thanks for any help.

[Guest kx450f]

It may be possible you need to down load the .EDS files for these drives from Mitsubishi or their web site & use the EDS wizard in RSnetworks to create them so they can be seen on your network. Regards

[Eddie Willers 2]

If the drives appear with question mark icons during a network browse, then you are simply missing the EDS file that allows RSNetworx/RSLinx to recognize them. If they don't appear at all, they are not responding to the software's attempts to connect to them via an explicit message. I've seen some devices that can only establish an I/O connection *or* an explicit message connection, but not both simultaneously. You can connect to them to configure before you get an I/O connection going, but as soon as the scanner has an I/O connection established, you cannot connect to the drives, even for browsing, with an explicit message. Not a great feature set, if you ask me. To determine this conclusively, you have to remove (or deactivate) one or more of the drives from the 1747-SDN's scanlist, then cycle power to the drive and attempt to browse it again. Not easy during production, but the only way to be certain. Check the Mitsubishi documentation to see if they mention an Unconnected Message Manager (UCMM) object. If they have a UCMM, they should support both messaging and I/O connections at the same time. Last time I commissioned a Mitsubishi drive on DeviceNet, we found that the drive would not recognize the scanner going into Idle mode (like on a controller fault) and we ended up dropping power to the whole network in an Idle condition so that the drives would not run away when we put the controller into Program Mode.

[Sharkster 0]

Thanks very much. I'll have to wait until the weekend to try what you recommended, but I believe you are onto something. I had already registered the EDS files for the devices. Some of the other guys in our dept. said they had changed out the FR-E5nd modules on some other drives and they could see the drives after this with RSLinx. I bet their is a parameter to select between the modes you had mentioned and I bet that the other installed cards had the parameters set to a mode that is causing this to occur. Thanks very much