AD DL260 comms

I ventured out of my AB/GE world today at a customer site and into the world of a AD DL260 CPU, modifying an existing program. Customer stated he had tried to download the program, and after going online, downloading, and then going to run mode, he lost communictaions, never to be reestablished. He talked to tech support, and they said something that was downloaded overwrote some system memory and corrupted com ports, both 1 and 2. I brought the processor home and placed an ecom module in the rack, and it will not connect either.

However, I did recreate the problem by downloading and successfully bricking another DL260 processor. Brilliant, I know.

Anyone heard of this? Apparently AD tech support has, but were not very forthcoming with details. I intend to rewrite the program from scratch to correct but...

What should I be looking for in the existing program that would cause this?

Anyone interested in looking at the code?

A thread on the AutomationDirect site indicated a problem when pointer based movement of information strayed into undocumented areas. Instead of just faulting the processor due to a write into an unauthorized area the write apparently modified sensitive system information including, previously thought immutable, the setup of the programming port. Please re-check your modifications for this possibility.

The system area is marked in the manual as V7600 to V7777.

Any program that uses indirect addressing (pointers) should be checking the pointer for validity. If the pointer isn't in the bounded area where it should be, the read or write should be aborted and an error flag created.

Thank you for replies. Apparently this problem existed before I ever got involved.

Program is not using any indirect addressing, or writing to specified V memory locations.

I'm guessing it is one of the 3 CTRIO module writing to these locations. Possible? I'm not up to speed on my CTRIO/CPU comms yet.

I suppose it is possible. You can view the CTRIO setup with CTRIO Workbench. It should install along with DirectSoft. Open DSLaunch and look in the Tools section.

unsunghippie,

However, I did recreate the problem by downloading and successfully bricking another DL260 processor.

Click to expand...

When you tried this at home did you have CTRIO's in the base?

Is the 260 powering up in the RUN mode? Is so try putting the front switch in STOP, power cycling and with the 260 still in STOP mode attempt to communicate with it.

Andy