slc500

hi
am an instrumentation engineer.two months back am posted as a maintanance enineer for a plant.ther we have allenbradley slc500 PLC.also we have a laptop with softwares loaded.but we dont have a back up file for same.wen i upload and created a new file i am not able to get the decription of the tags and rungs. only address are there.from this am not able to understand anything.so is there any other method for doing this?so that i can get all the tag descriptions and rung comments.please provide the details.

regards
peter

Peter,

The descriptions and symbols info is not stored in the PLC. Do you have anything of an offline copy? You can export / import the info if you do.

George

Greetings Peter ...

and welcome to the forum ... unfortunately the program's comments and descriptions are NEVER available from the SLC-500 type processors ... they simply are never downloaded into the processor - and that's why you cannot retrieve them ...

in other words, the "documentation" that you're looking for resides ONLY on a disk - never in the PLC processor ...

have you tried looking for a copy of a previously saved file? ... or maybe a printout showing the comments? ... if you can't find either one, then "reworking" the documentation from scratch is probably the only way to go about your task ... usually the electrical drawings (if available) are a big help in getting started ...

I wish I had better news for you ...

This is not a fun task if you cannot locate the documentation. A good challenge though! I had to do this a few weeks ago when I had to upload from a GE 90-30 and edit the logic. There was no way of finding the original files which were done in the late 80's. I contacted the original programmer, but he had changed companies and no longer had access to the program files.

If you have to do it this way, I would start by defining your I/O points from electrical drawings or by tracing wires if necessary. Then begin to decipher the logic from the I/O backward and start adding descriptions.