Comm of Ethernet.. Plc to PC

I have a general question for a stituation I am in at the moment. A project I am working on requires communication between 3 things. A plc using RS5000 .. a Digiforce sensor and a Domino Laser Printer. Both the Digi and the Domino are plugged into the ethernet network along with the plc. What I would like to do is be able to send commands to these 2 devices from the PLC. Both have a touchscreen windows based controller. And both are able to receive commands from my laptop via Hyperterminal. But I can;t get them to react in any meaningful way to commands I try to send from the plc.

Here's the question.

How do I emulate hyperterminal in the PLC or ethernet. What are the settings I need to use in the MSG instruction to communicate with a windows terminal on the network.

Any help on the subject would be great

Which Domino printer and Digiforce sensor are you using? What Ethernet ports do they communicate over? Which Logix 5000 PLC are you using? Which Ethernet module?

The Domino is an S200 series controller. The Digi is 9310 both the sensor and the controller. Not sure off the top of my head which ports the DIGI uses but the Domino uses its default port 20000. I believe the PLC is CompactLogix. I use RSLogix5000 for programing.

RS Linx sees both devices but come up as unknown. Which doesn;t surprise me.

I am fairly new to this industry

You need to give us a lot more infomation on what you are trying to do. MSG is only used to communicate to other device that understand Ethernet/IP.

NOTE: Just because a device/PC/whatever sit on the same physical network does not mean they are able to talk to each other in a meaningful way. For example, a guy who only speaks English isn't going to have a meaningful conversation with a guy only talks in French, even though they could be in the same room and hear each other.

I took a brief look at the Digiforce spec sheet and it seems it's using a serial or parallel port for PLC communication and not the ethernet port. Start with your Digi manual and go from there.

I am waiting on information from Burster. Most of the manual is in German. But my question still applies to the Laser. It does for a fact communicate over ethernet, I can operate it from hyperterminal. But I need to operate it from the PLC.

Just curious if anyone knows what the settigns are to get this too work. Or if it just isn't possible for a plc to send commands similar to the way hypertrerminal does.
If it isn't then I am goin to haveto switch both devices to serial which involves $$$

Neopimp said:

..It does for a fact communicate over ethernet, I can operate it from hyperterminal. But I need to operate it from the PLC

Click to expand...

Well, nothing I seen so far says it communicate from the ethernet to the PLC. Read what I said above. MSG from the PLC is on Ethernet/IP protocol and no printer I know would talk on Ethernet/IP...

PLC can talk on serial with the ASCII commands.

Furthermore, it's confusing when you said you want to communicate over the ethernet then talk about Hyperterminal. Do you mean TCP/IP or RS232 on Hyerterminal? If you are talking about TCP/IP, you know that TCP/IP <> Ethernet/IP, right?

So it isn;t possible for the plc to send commands to a regular tcp/ip device on the network. Even though hyperterminal can. ?

Neopimp said:

So it isn;t possible for the plc to send commands to a regular tcp/ip device on the network. Even though hyperterminal can. ?

Click to expand...

BINGO!

me said:

NOTE: Just because a device/PC/whatever sit on the same physical network does not mean they are able to talk to each other in a meaningful way. For example, a guy who only speaks English isn't going to have a meaningful conversation with a guy only talks in French, even though they could be in the same room and hear each other.

Click to expand...

Neopimp said:

The Domino is an S200 series controller. The Digi is 9310 both the sensor and the controller. Not sure off the top of my head which ports the DIGI uses but the Domino uses its default port 20000. I believe the PLC is CompactLogix. I use RSLogix5000 for programing.

Click to expand...

We need to know for sure which PLC and Ethernet interface you are using

Neopimp said:

So it isn;t possible for the plc to send commands to a regular tcp/ip device on the network. Even though hyperterminal can. ?

Click to expand...

Yes, it is completely possible, but you need an EWEB Ethernet interface with the Open Socket interface

Thanks for the info guys. I found your other thread on the EWEB Interface from 2005. That is exactly what i need to do.

I need to read a part number from the digi press.. read a number from the domino... compare... set domino to match if different. Plus check for a certain mode.

And since they work on TCP already, making th eplc comunicate over tcp would be ideal. If the programming isn;t much of an issue. I will be looking into the sample progs later.

This is what we have currently

1768-L43 CompactLogix5343 Controller - 169.254.201.143
Domino s200 Laser controller - 169.254.201.177:20000
DigiControl 9310 - 169.254.201.101:9310

I can ping them all.
I can send and receive information from the Digi and Laser(through Hyperterminal, winsock setting).

Seems like an EWEB would sufficefor what I need. Any other tips and tricks on this subject?

Since your doing it through the hyperterminal I'm guessing you know the commands to send and the port numbers. Post those. I'm not as good as others here with open sockets. Also search AB's knowledgebase. There are several good samples of using the open socket interface.

"_"= Space
For the LAser the commands that I will be using are
- "getcountervalue_1_" to get counter #1 value
- IT will return with "getcountervalue_result_1_x"

The digi works the same way but I am having difficulty with sending entire commands to the controller. If I am in hyper terminal and hit one character it immediatly send jus thte single char out to the digi, digi returns an error cause it isn't a complete command. Now if i hit a three character command all at the same time it returns what it should. So I am not sure if this is a setting in hyperterminal or waht cause I use autoconnect to configure hte connction. I am in contact with the company about this. But it does communicate.

I have been looking into the manual for the 1768 EWEB card. And a bit into the socket theory.

If I send the command to get the countervalue and the laser returns right away will the plc be able to read the data if it still on the write instruction. Will the plc send the comand and be ready for the result right away or will i need to have a command to start reading at the socket?

These connections will be active all the time. So there is no need to open and cloe the sockets I guess. Can I continually have the socket open to both read and write data?

These all may be ammatuer questions but I am one

Those sample programs are a great help. They even have some testing applaications.