MS Access as an HMI Pgm

Im in need of a really simple HMI application for a job I did a year ago. I have 4 optical turnstiles/gates in an office building that are used to control the flow of people coming and going. At present I have a console that has about 12 LEDs and a few buttons to change the mode of operation show alarms etc.

What the customer would like to do is have this info displayed on a PC in this lobby as well as in there command ctr. What I was thinking is a simple MS Access database with just a form with buttons to toggle binary info in the PLCs "Micrologi 1000" My question is how to get the PLC to talk with access?

This could be tough to do.

I am not familiar with your PLC, so have no specific knowledge.

On a larger PLC, you could purchase a 3rd-party "driver" for your brand PLC that reads the PLC memory registers through a serial port or Ethernet port.

The driver is installed and runs on the PC. Then you open an application like Excel (probably easier to work with than Access), and create a "Reference" to your PLC driver. This in turn allows you to fill spreadsheet cells with values read from the PLC.

The problem with this approach is that a small PLC probably does not have an available serial or Ethernet port.

A more indirect approach might work, if you have only a few data points: Purchase a discrete input card for the PC. Then hard-wire a few outputs from the PLC to the new inputs in the PC. The input card will have drivers with it, and may interface directly to Excel or some other application.

My surgestion would be to get RSLinx Single node(I think) that enables you to connect to a single node, using DDE I've done a few excel sheets that do this kind of thing and they work quite well.

If You've not done any DDE befor have a look at

MrExcel

Jezz

I'd recommend Excel as well; it seems to be the universal host for the "Poor Man's HMI".

Rockwell Software's knowledgebase has a bunch of articles about using RSLinx to connect Excel to controllers. The MicroLogix 1000 has a perfectly serviceable RS-232 DF1 protocol port.

Getting the data into one PC is easy. Getting it to another.... well, NetDDE can be a challenge. I don't know everything about that.