I'm still in the early days of working with a CompactLogix PLC here, but I wanted to see if any of you had some suggestions on how I could get a report of data out of this PLC after it finishes its job.
I've looked into using RS Logix and Visual Basic to dump out data into an excel spreadsheet (see here) but there are a few details about it that are concerning to me, never-mind the fact that I haven't used Visual Basic before...
1. Part of the data output would be string data and the links I get from RS Logix always present the values as SINT values instead of characters or the full ASCII string that I want to collect. I'm not sure how to handle the conversion and concatenation of these at this time...
2. I'm using EthernetIP to collect data from a few different devices and they all use a constant tag for data transfer between them. I suppose this means I need to either set the VBA script up to check on the tags every X milliseconds, or else use PLC logic to dump them to tables elsewhere after each data is read?
3. The tests that the PLC will automate can take anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours. For that reason I'm not sure if its better to wait for the full test to be completed or to try to gather data along the way and hope that I don't outpace the PLC logic or something else of that nature.
I suppose this post here is mostly me just thinking aloud, but I would love to hear some suggestions from anyone who has solved this sort of problem before.
I've looked into using RS Logix and Visual Basic to dump out data into an excel spreadsheet (see here) but there are a few details about it that are concerning to me, never-mind the fact that I haven't used Visual Basic before...
1. Part of the data output would be string data and the links I get from RS Logix always present the values as SINT values instead of characters or the full ASCII string that I want to collect. I'm not sure how to handle the conversion and concatenation of these at this time...
2. I'm using EthernetIP to collect data from a few different devices and they all use a constant tag for data transfer between them. I suppose this means I need to either set the VBA script up to check on the tags every X milliseconds, or else use PLC logic to dump them to tables elsewhere after each data is read?
3. The tests that the PLC will automate can take anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours. For that reason I'm not sure if its better to wait for the full test to be completed or to try to gather data along the way and hope that I don't outpace the PLC logic or something else of that nature.
I suppose this post here is mostly me just thinking aloud, but I would love to hear some suggestions from anyone who has solved this sort of problem before.