Micrologix 1100 recipe file ?

Hello all,

First some background. I have an 1100 with a Panelview+ 600, two 16 relay output cards and a 16 input card. The application is intefaced to a Panasonic TIG welding robot and provides the user with a clean pushbutton control panel for normal robot functions. Currently the operator is asked for the robot program number they wish to run (1 thru 999) and I simply take their input, convert to an integer, store it as a variable, and push it to the appropriate outputs (10 bits) which are tied to the robot digital inputs. I then signal a strobe which tells the robot to read the status of the 10 input lines and run the binary program number it finds present on them. (i.e. operator inputs program 10 and the bit pattern 0000001010 is sent to the output card) This works well, but I've been asked to update it some.

Now the customer wants to enter a PART NUMBER instead of a sequential program number. Their part number is along the lines of xxxx-xxx-xxx-xxxx where the x's are numbers or letters which are absolutely meaningless to me and there appears to be no mathematical solution to them. My idea is to store a table (recipe file?) that contains xxxx-xxx-xxx-xxx and the associated robot program number for that part. (i.e. A123-B23-998-A110 = program 10) then do some sort of scan thru the data file and compare the input part number to the numbers of file and then move the prgram number into the same variable as I used in my current program. If the part isn't found I can set it to 0 and display an error message.

OK, that's the concept.... any ideas on how to accomplish this? While I'm pretty good at "standard" PLC programming (relay logic) I'm relatively new to database functions & such.

One more request on this.... I'd love for the operator to be able to simply download an ascii file from their laptop to the PLC instead of having to write (and enter!) 1000 part numbers on the HMI.

Any suggestions are welcome!

Thanks,
Bob

Without having a discernable pattern or code to the part number, you would have to put all those code into the PLC to do a lookup, anyway.

You could easily make an ASCII table containing those codes, then do the lookup.
Use the ASR - ASCII String Compare to compare your input register to each element in your list by stepping through an indexed address.

Why not do the list - in Panelbuilder - that you already thought about?
I have done a spreadsheet copy/paste into PB; it's easy enough to get a list into there. Just get all your part numbers into a spreadsheet, highlight the column, COPY, open Panelbuilder. Use the Control List Selector and PASTE your list into the Message Text column.
I don't know if it will hold 1000 states, though - I'll leave that for you to try.
But that would be so unwieldy scrolling. Could you not divide the list into manageable parts? e.g. Part 001-000 through 50 or some such?
Rob