LURBY

PLC's, servo, and VFD OTHER than AB

7 posts in this topic

I have been a faithful user of Allen Bradley products for over 20 years. My distributor has been good to me over the years with very good pricing. I have been good to him as well with lots of orders. That might change in the near future. My pricing is not what it used to be. I know that prices continue to rise but my discount structure has changed drastically  

I am curious about what else is out there. I primarily live in the Micrologix PLC world. I also use the Kinetix 300 family of servo drives, the MPL series servo motors, the Powerflex family of VFD's, and 800T push buttons and switches. 

What do the rest of you use?  Why do you use it?  How difficult is the migration for someone that has used AB their entire career?

Thanks for your input,

Chuck

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This can be a difficult question to answer, as it depends largely on the answerer's (word?) experience and background. Also, don't necessarily go based on our recommendations. You need to make sure you have a good distributor that can provide technical assistance. Annoying as it sometimes is, particularly in the pricing department, Rockwell's support is really good. Other brands don't offer 24/7 phone support and a well-maintained knowledgebase, so having a distributor that is able to provide local help is often essential.

Aside from AB, I regularly use Mitsubishi, and use a fair amount of Siemens. I have also used Automation Direct. Of the three, I much prefer Mitsubishi, but that may be because that's where I started. The software and hardware is very reasonably priced, the hardware is reliable and compact (especially drives), the instruction set and processor speed is powerful, backwards compatibility is fantastic.

Because you're coming from RS Logix 500, the transition may be a little easier than if you were a heavy RS Logix 5000 user, as you'll be used to fixed memory addressing. Mitsubishi can do tags, sort of, but for small projects I find it easier to just stay with fixed addressing. Their implementation of tagging is a little wonky. It works but there are a few gotchas to be aware of.
 I can't really say much more than that as my transition was the other direction (Mitsubishi to AB), and I found it pretty easy. I would think it's no harder than switching to any other platform, and easier than some (Siemens comes to mind).

On the hardware side, here are some possible conversions for you:

Micrologix 1400  --> FX5U

Kinetix 300 -> MR-JE

PF 525 -> FR-D700

Mitsubishi doesn't make switches and indicators. I don't buy many, and usually from Automation Direct for convenience.

 

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Overall component cost is one issue, but support should be another issue to also take into consideration.  A-B has good annual contract support, in my opinion, but the cost can be hard to swallow.  

Servos...in most cases, servo controllers dictate servo motors.  If you migrate from Brand AB to another servo brand, this typically will require mechanical modification for servo motor/gearbox changes.  And servo/feedback cables will also need to be changed.

That being said, I agree with JRoss...Mitsubishi is a good alternative for Servo controllers/motors, VFDs, PLCs, HMIs; support is free, last time I called, but limited to M-F business hours.

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Mitsubishi will absolutely require you use a matched drive/motor set from them, so yes you'll have to do a mechanical change. If you're using a gearbox, this would be a simple matter of changing the input side of the gearbox, so not a big deal. Mitsubishi motors are usually smaller than AB, so unless the cable connections end up in an awkward location, mechanical changes could be fairly simple.

I haven't had spectacular success with Mitsubishi tech support. Though to be fair, I only call with the really weird stuff. I have the same trouble with Rockwell, but they are such a large group with a huge state-side install base, so there's usually one guy that has seen the problem before, if you can track him down. This is why I stressed local support rather than relying on corporate. The distributors know who to talk to.

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Omron also offers these products, and you may want to look at the NX1P2 controller and the 1S series servos.  And their support is free.

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@LURBY, I have a few comments. First, I know that part of Rockwell product prices are set by the quantity of items you purchase per family. I worked at a place once that had contracted out the panel build and had the panel shop purchase all of the material. I wanted to change that and purchase products ourself once we got a huge 3 million dollar line. I had a 100k worth of Rockwell products in it. Because we didn't have a history, our distributor did what they could to discount couldn't do much. Part of what they did was transfer over the discount from one product family that we did have to another product family.  (I think they chopped off about 12%). However, they brought in a Rockwell Sales Engineer who was able to work with the distributor which resulted in another 20% discount!!

My favorite PLC developement software, by far, is Logix5000. I would stop buying the micros and look at the low end Compacts. The prices almost overlap and using tag based programming and updated software with MANY conveniences truly makes life so much easier and enables author's to write code or change code to be much more portable, etc. 

With all of that being said. if you want a cheaper PLC, I've used the Unitronix PLC/HMI and I really liked it. There were a couple of quirks in the software that I ran into but the tech support was readily available, very easy to get a hold of, and super helpful. I've worked extensively with ControlLogix/GuardLogix, CompactLogix, S7-300s, Modicon 984s and Quantums, and then the Unitronix.  

As for servos, I have not worked with Rockwell Servos but I've worked pretty extensively with Siemens, Unico, and Emerson. The Emerson servos that can be used with the Emerson PowerTools Pro software are my favorite(digitax ST/Unidrive). The software is extremely intuitive. 

Hope this helps a little!

 

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    For drives and servos Yaskawa can't be beat.  They support lots of fieldbusses as well.

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