Getting Data from a PLC Automatically

Hi,

I am trying to collect information from a PLC for a college project. This Omron PLC is connected to 6 stations on an assembly line. I am trying to collect information like times for when the pallet enters station A and exits station A and so on.

I have currently identified the addresses needed for each station. For example when using time chart monitoring on the sysWin software I can see when address 001.00 goes high when enters station A and goes low when exits station A.

How would I go about timing this interval when the pallet is in the station automatically? Would it be possible to program in a timer into the ladder logic which could send the output time into a text file maybe?

All help will be greatly appreciated,
Thanks
Kevin

Kevin,

There may be other ways, but my suggestion, since this is a college project, is to use an OPC server (like KepWareEX) to extract the data from the PLC. Kepware's OPC server has a demo that is time-limited to two hours. After two hours, you just have to restart the runtime, and the clock starts over.

I don't know how much experience you have with application programming, but you could write a small OPC client in .NET to read the values and log them to whatever format you'd like -- .txt, MS Access, SQL, etc.

I have KepServerEXv5 running on a Windows box that is communicating with every PLC in our plant. I have a VB.NET application that obtains the values from the OPC server and logs them to a SQL server database.

This solution might be a bit more involved than you were hoping for, but I'm not sure that Omron has such a native capability.