AB Data Concnetrator

Hey everybody,

Just wanted to get some advice on the best way to set up a Allen-Bradley Data Concentrator. There are about 8 remotes sites most of which have 50-70 tags I would want to bring into the HMI. We are using the MDS entranet900 radios to communicate with the sites. The Data Concentrator will be a 1756-L61 processor and the remote sites will all be Compact Logix brick 1769-l23e. What is the best way to get all the data to the data concentrator? Should we just message back and forth, or can you set up a UDT as a PRODUCER/CONSUMER tag and pass all the info back and forth? How much traffic do PRODUCER/CONSUMER tags cause on a network. Can you message an UDT? All the radios will be on a seperate network in the Data Concentrators Chasis. Do we have to worry about traffic with this small of a network?
Any advice will be helpful. Thanks in advance

AFAIK a produce /consume setup consumes 1 connection per tag over ethernet. That can be a single dint tag or a array.

I don't know about any size limitations on the array with produce/ consume though maybe some more experienced users can help there.

The Plc Kid said:

I don't know about any size limitations on the array with produce/ consume though maybe some more experienced users can help there.

Click to expand...

500 (or actually 512) bytes is the limitation ( I believe)
So this would mean 125 DINTS in an array.

(BTW, I just done a course, so I hope that I listened at the right point....)

Yes, as long as the UDT structure is the same in the source and destination, you can MSG them back and forth.

For simplicity, I'd just have the L6x concentrator do a polling MSG Read (CIP Data Table Read) with your data UDT's and be done with it.

There is a 500 byte limit for any produced/consumed tag, without extra logic to break down the block into managable sized packets.

Thanks guys,

I will probally go the udt route since it seems that it will be the quickest and will be albe to keep everything organized. Thanks again for the information.