Devicenet FlexIO Mitsubishi Sattcon200

Hello,

I have a customer who wishes to replace some Sattcon200 PLCs with Mitsubishi Q series PLCs. To keep the costs down, I think it would be a good idea to keep the existing I/O and only change the CPU, power supply, comms modules etc.

The Sattcon200 uses Flex I/O (I believe this is the same as AB Flex I/O) with a special adapter to connect the I/O to the CPU backplane.

My idea is to replace the adapter modules with AB Devicenet Flex I/O adapters and then connect to a Devicenet master module installed in the Mitsubishi Q series PLC.

The manuals I have read seem to show that this setup is possible. But as I have never mixed AB and Sattcon Flex I/O equipment or used the Mitsubishi Devicenet module, I am a little bit uncertain whether it would work. Your knowledge and opinion would be gratefully received.

Also, to keep the costs down is it possible to have two or more masters with associated slaves running together on the same physical Devicenet network? (each master would only try to access it's associated slaves not the slaves of other masters).

Kind Regards

Alastair

Alastair.

I cant help you with the Satt stuff but I do use AB I/O (Flex & Compact) with the Mitsubishi DeviceNet card and this works well. The Mitsubishi card allows you to configure the scanlist from the PLC code and I would recommend that you do this for two reason:-

1) The Mitsubishi configuration software is not the most user friendly package I have ever used.
2) Once the PLC code is installed the DeviceNet card configures itself as soon as the PLC is turned on. If you ever need to replace a card you will not need to spend time on configuration.

Andy, many thanks for responding to my question. I'll follow your advice about configuring the card via PLC code instead of the configurator software.

Cheers