Babel Box

I know, because I wrote the software for it!

The Babel Box was originally sold by Paradigm Controls before and for a while after they were purchased by Red Lion. It's basically a data mapper. It reads data from a specified area in one PLC, and moves it to a specified area in another PLC. It works pretty well, as long as the data is located in well-defined regions. Red Lion gave an ex-Paradigm employee the rights to support the Babel Box in the UK, and I guess he's selling-off some of the stock he's got left. He's a good guy, and you'll get good support from him, and from the guys at MMI Solutions, although I guess technically they are competitors of ours now!

For new applications, might I recommend the Datat Station Plus?

http://www.redlion.net/Products/HumanMachineInterface/DataStationPlus/DataStationPlus.html


It does all the Babel Box did, plus a lot more, including support for more protocols, data logging to CompactFlash, scaling of data, and support for Ethernet connections. Think of the Data Station Plus as the offspring of the Babel Box and our G3 HMIs. It was developed by the same core team, but has a lot more up-to-date features than the BB.

Mike Granby
President
Red Lion Controls
 
Last edited:
MikeGranby said:
I know, because I wrote the software for it!

Mike:

Did you write the code for Crimson as well? Or was it written when you have become a big boss?

The reason I am asking is that this is one of the HMI products we were recently looking at to standardize on. But... we were missing a driver. Not sure if you care to know which one.
 
I wrote most of Crimson 1.0 and a fair bit of Crimson 2.0, although my day-job as President does tend to keep me away form the coding these days! I did a lot of the architechtural stuff, such as the database and UI engines for the config, and the RTOS for the runtime portion. I also did the GCC adaptations to get it work on the platform we're using. I still dabble, but there's a team of three other people who work on the core software for our products, and another couple of engineers who help out with comms drivers.

Re the missing driver, yes, I'd love to know! We're always looking to make the comms support wider, although it seems every year we figure we've got 'em all, and yet still more appear on the TODO list. Let me know, and I'll see what can be done. Even if it's too late for you, I'm sure you're not the only one who needs it. If it's something obscure, I'd also appreciate a tip on where we might borrow some kit -- that tends to be the trickiest bit half of the time.
 
Thank you for the reply, Mike. The driver in question is Yaskawa MP series Ethernet. You do have Yaskawa MP serial and a couple of Ethernet drivers for SMC motion controllers - but not for MP PLCs...

I played around with Crimson 2.0 demo (not a lot though) and it left an overall nice impression. But we did not pursue it (or, for that matter, any other competing product) mostly because of the absense of the driver - it doesn't make sense to re-do all our existing HMI applications from scratch if we cannot justify the time by better, faster communications.

If you want to know the specifics, please reply via PM - the details may not be appropriate to post on the public forum (hope everyone understands).
 

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