Programming Zebra Scanner to AB 1400 PLC?

[Tony B 0]

New to site, have a question which I'm sure has been ask several times before. I'm investigating the use of a Zebra Scanner connected to a AB 1400 PLC. So fare it looks like I will have to use the RS232 or RS232/RS485 connection to communicate with each other. Has anyone already invented the wheel for this and if so could you give me some pointers for programming this setup? I'm going to scan a label once in awhile when the the Press has a fixture change to identify which product is going to run.

Thank you for the advice. 

[AbrahamSIndustry 0]

I thing you are using a Micrologix 1400, you have to configure Channel 0 as ASCII. As shown:

Here I'm Using a Micrologix 1100, then all depends on the application you have to develop, for example configure the baud rate, configure the size of the sring you will receive.

In the channel configured as ASCII you will have 2 buffers: the Receive Buffer and the Send buffer, so you have to clear it once you have managed your data.

You will need to use 2 ASCII instructions for receiving data:

ARD: Ascii read

ACL: Ascii Clear

Here is how I use it, sorry for the comments in Spanish, if you need some help with that let me know:

You will need as well 3 types of variables, Control, String and if you want to convert the data to integer a Integer type. I recommend you to be careful when converting an ASCII to integer, an integer can have 2 words only.

[BobLfoot 301]

The last serial bar code reader I did the PLC was 1756-L6x and we used 1734-RS232 Flex I/O to do the RS-232.  Not sure if the 1400 will support the 1734 flex module or not.  May want to check.