Storing historical data from the Allen Bradley plc.

I have an AB L27ERM PLC and a Panelview Plus 1000 with a local network setup with a PC on the machiene.

1. What is the best method for exporting historical data (weeks and months worth) to be used in another piece of software (i.e. XL , Access , etc..)?

(My PLC is running out of room)

2. Where would I find information on how to do this?

Thanks!!!

There are lots of ways to get data from the PLC into a PC. So, the "best" way is kind of a rhetorical subject.

A fairly easy way is to buy a license of RSLinx Classic Pro and Microsoft Excel.

In RSLinx, you can "set up an OPC Topic" which is a connection between the PLC and Microsoft Windows. Then you can access the OPC topic in one of two ways from Excel.

The first way is to copy from RSLinx and paste into an Excel cell. This is good if you only have a few tags.

Or, you can use an Excel macro (a VBA routine) that reads up to 100 tags at a time, placing the values into some spreadsheet cells. If you data is located in a single array, it is easier. We've done this a few times to make simple production reports for some customers. The trigger for the macro can be a button on the spreadsheet, or a single cell value change that is triggered by the PLC, or some other event, like the time.

Thanks!!

Thanks for the advice I will start there.

Could you direct me to a more detailed description of how to accomplish this?

Thanks again.

Bbarr:
I've been using XLReporter from sytech.com for more the 8 years with no problems, you can try downloading it and run demo for two hours. There are also others companies that sell similar products, in any case you need an OPC server like rslinx classic professional.

That sounds like exactly what I am looking for but I am having trouble setting it up. In the DDE/OPC topic configuration i dont see any place to specify what tag/tags to export or specify where they are going.

Is there a tutorial for this somewhere?

Could you direct me to a more detailed description of how to accomplish this?

Click to expand...

This document shows how to use RSLinx to copy/paste a Logix tag to a worksheet cell. http://literature.rockwellautomation.com/idc/groups/literature/documents/gr/linx-gr001_-en-e.pdf

I attached an excel macro that copies multiple tags to worksheet cells when activated. To avoid uploading a macro enabled spreadsheet to the forum, I attached a .txt file instead. It has some instructions and code you can copy from notepad to excel.