RSLogix 5000 i/o listing

We recently had half a dozen of our machines upgraded from Plc5's with Kollmorgen BDS servodrives to Logix5000's with AB drives with a sercos interface(works great!)

But....
Now I need to generate an I/O listing for the new CLX machines, and I'm not really sure what the best way is to generate something useful to the maintenance techs on the floor.

The i/o are being mapped to a different set of tags, and then these tags are being aliased by another set of tags, with the last set being the only ones with documentation.

Is there a simple way to generate a listing of all of aliased i/o tags used in the program, that will still reference the physical i/o on the cards? I can't think of one using the report options in the CLX, but I haven't had a whole lot of experience with some of the different options for displaying tags.

Right now, I'm exporting all of the tags to excel, and trying to arrange something that way.

Does anyone else have a different way of doing this, or is this pretty much the best way to go about it with the setup we are using?

And going along with the excel theory... The descriptions that take up more than one line have these nifty little $N symbols for every carriage return. Does anyone know how to filter the $N out of the descriptions in excel when I print them out? It looks kinda sloppy...

Tom,

If you are using a fairly new version of Logix5000 (ver 12+) you can open up your tag databases and go to the edit tags listing. Double-click on the "Alias For" topic at the top of the sheet and the tags will be sorted by alias name. Then you should be able to highlight all the tags with an alias and do a "copy and paste" directly into Excel. It's a bit easier than exporting the tags, but you will have to do this to all your different sets of program level tags.

to filter the $N out of the descriptions in excel ,you can try the find and replace from excel Edit menu.
find :$N
replace with:.

The descriptions that take up more than one line have these nifty little $N symbols for every carriage return. Does anyone know how to filter the $N out of the descriptions in excel when I print them out?

The easist way I have found is a Search and Replace from the Excel File. Click on Edit/Find and Tab to Replace or Ctrl F. Make sure you type a space in the "Replace with" field. In the "Find what:" field type in $N.

If you find out answers to your other questions, please update this post. I need to do a similair cross reference soon to verify my program.

Just thought I'd give an update here...

It definitely seems to be that(at least in my case, with the existing program supplied by the OEM) the best way to do things was with Excel.

I exported the data files, deleted the header data and a couple of useless(for my purposes) columns, and turned on the Auto filter option. By filtering the name column using the "starts with" option under the custom filter option, I was able to generate the I/O tables I wanted, which still showed what the tag names were aliased with.

The format ended up being something along these lines for the inputs.

Name        Description                   Specifier

I_12_13     Random_input_for_something    Input_140.12

I made these tags up just so you could see what the format looked like. I'd post the original tags, but we have some confidentiality agreements with the OEM, so I'm not sure if I'm allowed to. It's not perfect, but then I would have chosen some of the tag names differently if I were setting things up.

That looks pretty reasonable to me. If the techs can access the electronic copy they can sort either by tagname or by specifier, depending on which side they are approaching the problem from. I think this is a good solution given what you have to work with.


Keith