Data capture from PLC Controller

Hello everybody,

please lend a hand (and mind) to help me with an issue I'm currently having.

Company uses some 20 years old PLC machine that has a variable production cycle and reports the state (some readings about the product). The report goes from the Mitsubishi PLC controller to another controller and then to an old matrix printer via serial port.

The type of the sent data is - basically some text and numbers, with one graph of the readouts from the sensor.

What I want to do now is to remove the old matrix printer and have the data received and stored on a PC in some readable form (PDF e.g.)

I've managed to set up a serial connection and to receive data sent to printer and store it on a laptop, but it's just a bunch of gibberish. What can I use to read that data and to convert it to some acceptable format?

Is there a software intended to capture data and "read" it in a way that can be presented to clients, stored, etc.?

Thank you in advance for any help on the subject...

ascii to excel

The data to the printer may be in ascii format, try importing it into excel.

Thank you for your suggestion, but it seems that the file is unreadable.

Maybe I need a different software (we have tried a PuTTy logger) ž

What would be the best software to capture data from PLC via RS-232?

It would be best if I get my hands on some valid trial version and if we get the correct readouts we'd buy it.

PuTTy or anything similar should do the trick but you are likely getting gibberish as the PLC is outputting the PRINT DATA in RAW or PostScript to the printer so you need some application to take the print data and decode it.

Not sure if this is any help but they do have a serial to file logger http://ericphelps.com/prn2pbm/index.htm

http://www.photologic.ca/cap.html

http://www.aggsoft.com/serial-printer-logger.htm

Portmon was useful to me in the past:

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/portmon

It is not possible to find the code that generates the ASCII string that is sent to the printer, and from that find out what PLC variables are used. If you know what PLC variables to log, you can then setup a standard data logging with whatever SCADA or logging software you have available.
IMO this is a more flexible and future-proof solution than trying to grab the ASCII string and decode it. If you have a SCADA or data logging software already, it will be free apart from the time you have to spend getting it to workm which may be less than the ASCII string grab idea.

One client wanted me to do a similar serial printer port capture on his 30 year old control system. The controller ended up being modernized, and I developed a SCADA project to take the information from the new control system and write it to a database, from which reports could be taken.

I'm with Jesper. It's better to identify the source values needed, and do some data logging in an HMI/SCADA software. I can recommend CitectSCADA, but, of course, the choice is yours.

Do you have examples of what has been previously printed, and what data you have captured? Perhaps if we saw it we could have a better idea what you are up against.