9030 communication problems

[scottl 0]

Hi all I have just bought a 9030 ge fanuc 5 slot plc a 313 and have versa pro software which I have used in the past on a series 90 ge fanuc plc and I also have lm90 software and I have a usb cable set up for com 4 on my pc. I can communicate as far as run and stop on the versa pro ver1.1 software but can not config software for the 9030 hardware and on the lm90 software I can not get it to communicate it alarms with no communication can some please help with this problem Thanks Scott

[Steve Bailey 118]

First, LM90 and USB/serial adapters don't always play well together. LM90 is a DOS application and was superceded by VersaPro before USB became widespread. Versa Pro has since been superceded by Proficy Machine Edition. Your version 1.1 of VersaPro is old. VersaPro in its earlier versions was notoriously buggy. I personally wouldn't touch anything earlier than version 1.5. My suggestions to you are 1, upgrade to something newer, and 2, run it on a computer with a real serial port.

[scottl 0]

Hey Steve I am using ic690usb901 cable and it is set up as com4 on my pc are you saying I should get a different cable this is the one I was told to get from the person I got the controller from I also got the lm90 software from the same source not sure if the lm90 software is setup right but I have worked on it for about 2 hours and can't seem to get it to communicate Thanks Scott

[scottl 0]

Hey Steve or if you could sent a hwcfg file for the 9030 with a 313 and inputs and outputs that would work also

[Steve Bailey 118]

How would that help? I don't know what I/O modules you have installed. However, if all you have are discrete or analog input and output modules, and no mixed discrete or mixed analog modules, then there is a default configuration. The first slot will have a starting address of %I0001 if there is an input module installed there. It will have a starting address of %Q0001 if there is an output module installed there. It will have a starting address of %AI001 if there is an analog input module installed there. It will have a starting address of %AQ001 if there is an analog output module installed there. The second slot will have a starting address of %I0033 if there is an input module installed there. It will have a starting address of %Q0033 if there is an output module installed there. It will have a starting address of %AI009 if there is an analog input module installed there. It will have a starting address of %AQ005 if there is an analog output module installed there. Subsequent slots will increase the starting address by 32 for discrete inputs or outputs, by 8 for analog inputs, and by 4 for analog outputs. Obviously that means you can't use default configuration for analog input modules with more than 8 channels or analog output modules with more than 4 channels. You also can't use default configuration for any "smart" modules like the high speed counter module, servo controller module, or programmable coprocessor module.

[scottl 0]

Hey Steve do you know were I can get a update for versapro from version 1.1 to something newer

[Steve Bailey 118]

Your local GE distributor might still have VersaPro CDs gathering dust. Of course, they'll try to sell you Machine Edition, but if you're on good enough terms with them (meaning your company actually buys stuff from them) they might be willing to help you out.

[paulengr 44]

Sounds all well and good. Good luck finding one to meet this specification. It's getting harder all the time because unfortunately, Bill Gates published some stupid standard that said that RS-232C is officially obsolete according to Microsoft back in the days of "Plug-and-Play" (another hardware debacle that lives on) and that USB is now the standard. This happened back in the 1990's. PC manufacturers listened because although at first USB was somewhat more expensive to support (the USB chips were initially much more expensive than UART), the power supplies are almost nonexistant (same supply you have tor a disk/CD/DVD/floppy drive) so it made the overall port cheaper to manufacture, and they began shipping without RS-232C about 10 years ago since the only people still asking for them were crusty old industrial controls people (a niche market to say the least). Today, you cannot buy a PC with real serial ports these days from HP, Dell, or any other major manufacturer. Like it or not, we now live in a world where we are required to deal with the vagaries of the USB/serial converter. Even the Panasonic Toughbooks don't come with one any more. Now my knowledge of this stuff comes from living THROUGH the plug-and-play transition (and UART's and ISA bus, and so forth...been working with this stuff since the late 1970's). My engineering degree was specifically in analog electronics so I'm very aware of the board-level designs, but I went "native" somewhere along the way and started working on the industrial controls side rather than sticking with the hardware manufacturing side of things. We've got over 2 dozen 90/30's still where I'm at, and this specification is very hard to meet. Periodically I have to buy a couple different serial adapters, test them, and then buy a bunch more. About once every 6-12 months, whatever USB/serial adapter worked before is obsoleted. Again...I'm nursing these things along until they can all be replaced. I've already managed to get rid of 5 of them in about a year and will be getting rid of 2 or 3 more this year. GE Fanuc has obsoleted only of the 16 bit output cards and all but one PLC model so that helps tremendously with convincing management that these things are going to eventually bite us. Also note that not all GE Fanuc power supplies are compatible with all GE Fanuc PLC's. You can also get some side/background information about these things by looking at information on Toyo PLC's. 90/30's at least originally were rebranded Toyo PLC's. Any product that has no differentiating features like a serial/USB adapter also means that in a free market society, the profit margin on the product drops to effectively zero (2-3%)...so nobody wants to sell these things because there's no money in it. Standards can be a good thing and obviously commodity products command very low prices which is good for the buyer, but a horrible situation for the supplier, especially one that is supposed to be delivering 10%+ annually to the stock holders. Mass production only gets you so far. Hence there is a huge market drive to make USB/serial adapters cheap by cutting corners. Unfortunately there are no labelling standards either so there's no way to tell which ones properly implement the standards and which ones are junk from the packaging. There are three problems with these things: cutting corners on the EIA/TIA specification, cutting corners on the USB specification, and cutting corners of the USB specification by the laptop manufacturers themselves. 1969 EIA RS-232C specs are that a voltage of 3 to 15 volts (either positive or negative) is a valid signal. Anything greater than 15 volts is invalid (although the spec allows for open loop voltages as high as 25 volts to overcome long cable distances) and anything below +/-3 volts to be invalid. Specs also say maximum of 20 kbps but obviously nobody follows that either. In practice, "true" (as in following the specification to the letter) systems were originally built to use +/-12 volts. However, in the days of the ISA bus architecture (the original "PC" bus), the power supplies were fairly large. They had a standard connector that worked on almost any kind of disk drive that had 4 pins in it: ground, +5 volts, -5 volts, and +12 volts (unregulated). That same power was available on the motherboard as well (I don't recall what was available on the ISA bus itself). So the first step towards cutting corners was that PC manufacturers started implementing RS-232C COMPATIBLE ports. It wasn't a real RS-232C specification port. It only used +/-5 volts instead of +/-12 volts. So long cables were out. This also become something of a necessity because cable capacitance limited speeds, especially with UART chips began supporting speeds well above the 20 kbps specification. Still, at least +/-5 volts was within the specification range, although this became a problem with higher speeds and/or long cables (cable capacitance puts pressure on the power supply and/or transmitter chip to drain the capacitor faster when switching). That was then. USB provides +5 volts power on the bus. So there are two choices. Either put in a DC-DC converter and hope that the upstream USB power supply provides enough power to drive it to produce the required power (to produce +/-5 volts) and still have enough margin to drive a {hopefully short) cable and RS-232C compatible receiver, or hope that the receiving device is very, very tolerant of bad RS-232C implementations and will allow something close to +/-1 volt, which most will no matter what the specification says. Now the DC-DC converter costs money and makes USB/serial adapters a two-chip solution. The very cheap USB adapter simply uses a resistive bridge to output +/-2.5 volts by splitting the 5 volt power supply and doesn't need a DC-DC converter at all. So out goes the +/-3 volt specification except for some very rare ones that find that customer complaints and returns are unacceptably high. It will act erratic if the cable lengths aren't right, or the cable is cheap (too thin), or there are too many devices on the USB bus, or something like that. But most users will not notice (hopefully). And since at this point nobody is really following 1969 EIA RS-232C any more, you can always assign blame to someone else, or set up a customer service number in India where the customers will just give up when they figure out that there is no real support. In addition, since there is no true "UART" any more, and no stiff power supply, the actual signals get very mushy and don't have sharp corners. It becomes progressively harder for the receiver to detect what represents an edge in the signal transitions. So even if the voltages are correct, it might still not work well because the manufacturer decided that big, fat electrolytic or even better, metal film, capacitors don't fit well inside a little dongle case and plastic (and capacitors) cost more money. So shaving a few cents off by undersizing the capacitor means that the signal shape also suffers. Of course GE (Toyo) 90/30 PLC's are very finicky about this stuff and do NOT LIKE CHEAP USB/RS-232 ADAPTERS. So that's your first hint why things don't work very well...cutting corners in the electrical side of the adapter. Now if you have a breakout box and an oscilloscope, all of these ridiculous corner cutting maneuvers become painfully obvious. But even if you don't do this, the above basic architectural decisions should explain why so many controls guys keep trying to suggest that you just go find yourself a 1980's vintage "luggable" Compaq somewhere that still works running DOS and don't bother trying to upgrade for at least another 50 years or so. By then, one of three things will happen: they have retired and don't have to concern themselves with it anymore, or Microsoft obsoletes USB, or PLC manufacturers give in and put USB chips in their equipment. Second problem is that the USB standard has some standard devices defined. Among them is RS-232 (serial port adapters). For some unknown reason, a lot of vendors choose to simply not follow the standard to the letter on the software side. It seems to work OK for a relatively modern Windows program that relies 100% on the software libraries provided by Microsoft. Old DOS (LM90) software on the other hand never had hand-holding from Windows software libraries. All of these programs are designed to use a UART. The original UART was the National Semiconductor 8250, used in the original IBM PC's. One of the problems with the original chip was that if the software didn't service the port quickly enough, the character was lost when the next one came in. So this meant that the UART chip had the capability of sending a signal to cause the software to stop what it was doing and read the port, the interrupt. However, there were never any really formal standards on what interrupts did what, only a series of informal standards. So there were all kinds of interrupt conflict issues and strange dip switch settings on cards that were always confusing to PC technicians and consumers alike. This is the reason that the PNP (plug-and-play) standard was brought into existence in the first place. Instead of cards just picking an interrupt, the PNP interface allowed them to negotiate for one in software. Second major innovation in UART's was the National Semiconductor 16550 which had a 16 character buffer, and many variants were produced after this. There were essentially just 2 interrupts available in the default architecture for PC's, supporting either dual UART chips or two separate cards. As the number of serial ports for special applications grew, more chips were mapped into the exact same interrupt. So each piece of software in turn would check for the card it was looking for. If there was no new data available, it would pass control onto the next piece of software in a daisy chain until everything was checked over. Needless to say, that's taking an awful timing risk especially as serial port speeds increased that a byte would get missed here or there, so the 16550 essentially fixed this problem permanently. But the important detail here is that regardless of who made it, the memory architecture and the interrupts were almost a standard. Anyone deviating from it had all kinds of compatibility issues. When USB came along, implementing the NS 16550 architectural interface was considered critical. So the serial devices of the mid/late 1990's emulated the 10-15 year old NS 16550 interface so that everything still worked as expected. DOS was alive and well, and when Windows 95 came along later (with PNP), it still supported the same old standards. When USB came along, the drivers that Microsoft originally produced simply emulated the 16550 UART interface in software. DOS still worked as expected for DOS emulation, and Windows worked as expected without any need for the DOS compatibility layer, where the interrupts and the memory mapping were no longer needed. Today of course, "nobody" uses DOS anymore. So there is far less of a need for maintaining absolute, strict compatibility with the 8250/16550 hardware interface. So corners get cut here and there. Perhaps some of the status bits don't get implemented or the interrupt function works only on one of the two available interrupts. Cut a corner here, cut a corner there. By now nobody gets giant 1000 page chip specification catalogs on paper anymore. Everything is PDF, and it is doubtful any of it is translated cleanly to Indian or Mandarin languages. Companies farm out their software development and buy "IP" UART, USB, or other implementations. Nobody selling the actual hardware has actually ever read the specifications that they are implementing. "Testing" consists of plugging it into a PC and a modem on the bench...that's the test bench. Nobody in the testing world tests it with an oscilloscope (too much money) or a GE Fanuc 90/30 PLC because they didn't even develop the firmware...they bought it. The software and hardware real estate gets just a bit smaller. Snip a corner here, cut another one there. EIA doesn't do round robins or testing, so no danger of anyone actually checking compatibility, especially when it is being marketed to Walmart. Now unfortunately, USB/serial port adapters do not come with labels (hopefully standards based) that tell you what percentage of the UART and USB serial port adapter standards they follow. They also don't tell you what the actual output voltages are. If they did or if there were PC magazines that cared enough to review these things, we wouldn't be in this situation. Then again, PC managazine reviewers are more interested in the bells and whistles that don't follow standards than how "compatible" things are, so they are definitely not interested in doing reviews on USB/RS-232C adapters. So you have no idea when you buy one how close it implements either standard except by testing. Finally, if you haven't noticed lately, laptop power supplies are getting smaller and low power all the time. So knowing that USB device manufacturers recognize that the 5 volt spec is also somewhat weak (long cables = lower voltage), they've also cheaped out on the power supplies so even if everything is right with the USB adapter, you might still have a cheap port in the laptop that doesn't work. I know that many times the recommendation is to eliminate all the hubs and that sounds good, but often the hub is also internal to the laptop! So sometimes adding a powered hub solves the problem, and sometimes not. If it does, sometimes some of the ports on a particular PC/laptop are different from others, and simply moving the device to a different port may fix the problem. I know that at this point it sounds like the original suggestion (finding a 1990's or earlier vintage PC or laptop that still works) sounds like just about the only viable option. But I can tell you that I've had good luck with three sources: 1. Keyspan in general seems to produce decent USB/serial adapters. That's a general rule, not always accurate. I've had a few stinkers lately and I'm no longer sure how good this recommendation is. 2. B&B Electronics markets communications stuff to the electrical/controls world and I've had good luck buying USB/serial adapters from them. They get lots of feedback from other industrial controls customers and have a pretty liberal return policy, so they've done the "testing a few" devices for you ahead of time before they try to sell something...returns cost them money and credibility. 3. Call Siemens on their drives. Why Siemens? Because they are a very large company, they still respect their customers enough to have real customer support, and their drives all require serial port connections (at least the 6RA70's that I buy). They have a list of recommended serial port adapters.

[bartolim 0]

We were banging our heads against the wall trying to find a PC with a REAL serial port, too... having gone through the headiaches of a USB to serial converter. You can get one from GE, or GEXPRO, or Allen Bradley, etc. (yes, GE is not the only one in town that has this issue), and ALL of them work SOME of the time, but NONE of them work ALL of the time. They are also non-interchangeable from brand to brand, for the most part. Having said that, we came up with the Panasonic Toughbook CF-52. It is available from CDW (among others, I think) , and it still comes with a real, live, honest-to-goodness serial port, along with USB and a lot of other goodies. We got ours about 4 months ago, and a bonus, it came with XP Pro SP3 installed, with a Windows 7 Pro CD thrown in. I am not sure what they are shipping with now. For under $1500, it has done everything we could throw at it.

[Steve Bailey 118]

Who said you have to buy a new PC? There are plenty of older PCs out there with serial ports. All you really need to support your older PLCs is a PC with the OS that was current at the time they were new. I still have a PC with a 386/25 mHz processor and a whopping 20 meg hard drive that I use exclusively to support old GE Series 6 PLCs. Talk about a niche market.... Are you letting the IT department dictate what tools the maintanance department is allowed to use? I have a couple of clients who have issues like that. Their IT department specifies all aspects of all computers the company purchases and retricts the privilege levels of the end users to the point where the maintenance people can't even assign a COM port to the USB/serial adapter or change the IP address. When that's the policy, I advise them to buy a "PLC programmer" instead of a PC so the equipment doesn't have to be vetted by IT. Of course the "PLC programmer" looks a lot like the Dell laptop that IT approved... Paulengr, Who is this "TOYO" you mentioned. I was working for a GE distributor when the Series 90 first came out and I never that name mentioned. At first I though you might have mistyped "KOYO", the parent of Automation Direct and the manufacturer of Series One, the 90-30's predecessor. But you used that name enough times your post to make me believe you meant it. My understanding was that the 90-30 was a joint development effort between GE and Fanuc. They used the same I/O modules in the 90-30 and Fanuc CNCs. The only difference was the color of the plastic case. And why are you buying new USB/serial adapters every 6 - 12 months? Do they sprout legs and walk away?

[paulengr 44]

When you work in a mine and have around 25 electricians and these things get used (and occasionally abused) a lot, you go through one once in a while. If I could find a laptop for $300 a piece that had a real serial port, real USB, almost no hard drive (no need), and perhaps sporting two Ethernet ports (though one is OK), that would support VMWare tightly enough so that I could just dump a Windows image onto it as needed (probably just boot from a high speed USB), I'd be happy. We need a commodity troubleshooting tool in this business. I'd want VMWare so that I could "fix" anything that gets messed up and so that I could continue to support Windows XP instead of Vista 7.

[Steve Bailey 118]

To the best of my knowledge, Koyo never had anything to do with the Series Six. The Series One, Series Three, and Series Five were all Koyo hardware. The 90-30 was a joint development effort between GE and Fanuc. Around the time GE and Fanuc formed their joint venture for PLCs and CNC controllers, GE and Koyo parted. Koyo went on to market the product formerly known as the Series One with Texas Instriments, calling it the TI305. Later, Siemens bought TI's PLC business and called the product the Siemens/TI305. Then Koyo formed PLC Direct (now Automation Direct) and continues to market the product as the DL305. The GE Fanuc joint venture was dissolved in December 2009. GE is now selling their PLCs and automation software under the banner of "GE Intelligent Platforms". Fanuc continues to sell CNC controllers (formerly labeled GE Fanuc) as "Fanuc CNC America". As far as I know, there never was any connection between GE and Fanuc in the robotics market, although I believe there was such a thing as GE Fanuc lasers.