RSLogix EWEB Card Question

I've spent some time digging around the RA knowledge base and couldn't really find the answers I was after regarding the EWEB card.

Does anyone here have any experience with them that they might be willing to share regarding what they know about it? Uses, limitations, differences to the ENBT and EN2T cards, etc.?

I was hoping it might be a better alternative to sending email on events than my current set-up using the ENBT card.

Thanks for any help you can provide.

Dave

With so many seasoned users here, is there no one that can help answer this question? Any help is better than none.



Dave

Overview

http://literature.rockwellautomation.com/idc/groups/literature/documents/pp/1756-pp006_-en-p.pdf

Manual

http://literature.rockwellautomation.com/idc/groups/literature/documents/um/enet-um527_-en-p.pdf

Developers Toolkit

http://www.ab.com/linked/networks/webenabled/eweb.html

The eweb is a very different animal from the enbt and en2t

ENBT and EN2T are for comms and EWEB is a web server. An example is if you have any distributed IO on ethernet or drives most of those have a embedded webpage that gives model info and some diagnostics and configuration

You mentioned email and that is handled by the processor so both the enbt or en2t will work.

EN2T just handles more connections and is a little faster than the ENBT.

What exactly do you want to accomplish? Give us the story and there may be a better alternative altogether.

I have used it for connecting to third party equipment that uses standard ethernet. I was looking at getting another one for connecting to a LED sign but my local rockwell group said that in RSLogix 5000 version 20 , some of the functions in the EWEB card are available in the EN2T card. It seems like in the near future there won't be much difference.

From standpoint of sending emails, all Exxx modules act very similar.
if you need more than just built-in SMTP client then you can write your own using Open Sockets.
Originally Open Sockets were introduced in EWEB only, but as of today there is wide vaiety modules that support Sockets.
With firmware rev 5.7 EN2T and EN2TR modules have this functionality.
V20 is NOT required, it only adds large packet capabilitiy.

Thanks for the links PLC Kid. They will be quite helpful.

We already send email through an SMTP server using the ENBT card but I can only send an email to one recipient at a time. I was under the impression I could send email to multiple recipients on a single event with the EWEB card.

I have a data collection system that uses a ControlLogix L-61 PLC as a Data Concentrator with two ENBT cards and one EN2T card in the rack communicating with 87 different PLCs (RSLogix and SLC 5/05) as well as communicating with Factory Talk Transaction Manager for data storage and an OPC Video Server system for plant wide information displays using LCD screens driven by video server clients. The EWEB was to be added to this Data Concentrator.

The idea was to send emails and/or SMS's to multiple people on critical machine and line events and/or faults. I was hoping the EWEB might be a solution.

I'm sure I'll find out more about that after perusing the info from the links you graciously provided. If not, I am also looking at another piece of software (Cogent DataHub) that can do that using monitored OPC events to send an email.

Thank you to everyone for your replies and help. I really do appreciate it.

Dave

EWEB functionality does not provide multiple reciepient email feature

But there is an example in the knowledgebase on how to do it - it takes few seconds longer and delay is not very critical with emails.

@ DGillen

This may seem out of line with what you do now but why try to use the controler to send emails to multiple people?

Are you using a internal mail server or cloud based?

No matter which why not send the alarm to a single address that you manage then make a rule for that account to forward all emails from the logix system to your list of 50 people or whatever.

I would keep things simple on the controller side.

I use the email functions also but we send from each line and machine to a maintenance addresss then forward based on a rule to the peole that need the info and all the controllers in the plant only have to deal with 1 address.

After some discussion we have decided that the OPC software platform (Cogent DataHub) will give us greater flexibility in sending emails and SMS messages to multiple addresses, and allow us the ability to send fully customized HTML emails to our suppliers. And the cost of the software is less than the EWEB card.

Once again, thank you to everyone for your replies and help. I really do appreciate it.

Dave