SLC 5/03 1747-SN Block Transfer Communications

I have a SLC 5/03 processor communicating via remote I/O to an old PV 1200 that has died. It uses RIO and block transfers according to the programming files that I have. The PV 1200 was communicating with a 1747-SN scanner card. We have replaced it with a new PV 1250+ with a communication adapter card.

Now there is 8 btr and btw in the PLC code accomplished by moving data into the M file. It is listed as rack 1 and a full rack in the scanner module. Now the PV 1200 type is listed as PLC-5/250 5150-RS which I find confusing. Can this be right? I think it might have been used, so that block transfer files could be used.

The block transfer file setup in the old PV 1200 is as follows
F1- R1 0, Low Byte, 32
F2- R1 0, High Byte, 32
F3- R1 1, Low Byte, 32
F4- R1 1, High Byte, 32
F5- R1 4, High Byte, 32


Now my understanding is that in the RSView ME software I setup the RIO driver and need a read and write for each of these transfer files because each is bi-directional. So each of these read and writes will take data from the scanner and place it in the corresponding block memory locations in the PV. Is that right? How does the block transfers in the PV get activated or enabled?

I can figure out the rest of the steps but unfortunately do not have all the hardware here, just the PV, so I can't run the tests I would like. Any other tips would be appreciated. Thank you in advance.

This is going to take some work

Go through the block transfer functions in your SLC code carefully and determine which ones are Reads and which ones are Writes, and compare the Rack/Group/Slot address they are using to that table from the PanelView 1200.

Probably that Rack 1, Group 4 block is not used in the PV1200 (my guess).

In RSView Studio, specifically in RSLinx Enterprise, you set up a RIO adapter and configure its discrete RIO address and size (Rack 1, Full Rack in your case) as well as configure the Block Transfer tag arrays.

You can send a Block Transfer Read and a Block Transfer Write to the same "Rack/Group/Slot" address, and the data gets separated depending on whether it's a Read or a Write. That's how you are getting eight BTx instructions for only four "R/G/S" entries.



This isn't the easiest conversion in the world; RSView ME's RIO tools can be a little hard to understand even for a veteran like me, and there were some memory-conservation tricks that the PV1200 had that the PV+ lacks because bandwidth is so cheap on modern networks.

Check also the OS and FRN of the SLC-5/03; it might make sense to upgrade to the current firmware so that you can take advantage of the BTR and BTW instructions that replaced the old copy-files-to-buffers mechanism.

Thanks Ken. I have quite a bit of experience and came to the same conclusion eventually, but this particular one really made me scratch my head for a while. I really appreciate the response.