Moving data from multiple programs to panelview

Hello all, I have recently started my first industrial electrician job in a mill a lot of its employees. There are no contractors brought in for any new projects to be done or new machinery that needs to be automated and installed. This provides a get learning experience right from initial assembly and program writing, to preventative maintenance and repair. Over the next few months I would like to help to increase the productivity and response time so that we can lower the overall down time. What I would like to do is to set up a program that works with all the other programs we have running. There are many outputs in our programs that are simply alarm conditions and when met send alarm signals to various panel views for the operators in those certain areas. I would like to take certain alarms from programs that when met send an alarm display to a virtual panel view program to start up and run on our shop computer (as we don't have any extra panel views laying around) so that we have a better idea of the problem and what we might need to bring with us before heading to the other side of the mill. We are running rslogix 5 and have a couple different panel view programs, panelbuilder 1400e and factory talk. This is the part I am not to sure about is how to set up the monitor/display program any help or any links would be greatly appreciated thank you for any wisdom you may have for me.

I did something similar when I worked for a big manufacturing plant with numerous assembly lines.

All the assembly lines where initially set up as islands in and of themselves so the first task was to make sure I had someway of communicating to each Assembly line. No small feat.

Once that task was complete, and I could reach out and touch each PLC, I developed an Assembly Area Overview HMI on our Support Tech Area Computer that let us know when equipment was alarmed/shutdown/faulted, etc and any other information we found useful to have at our fingertips and monitor.

I used WonderWare to develop this since it was what I had available. Some other platform like AB's FactoryTalkView would work just as well.

The key to doing this I believe would hinge on being able to communicate with the various PLC's and associated equipment you're wanting to monitor.

-Bobby

We're doing something similar right now. As Bobby said, the important thing is making sure you have a path for communication between yourself and the PLCs and don't worry so much about the HMIs because they're using information FROM the PLCs. After that, it's easy enough to set up an alarm screen or whatever you need. Microsoft Excel is even capable of monitoring data in your PLCs providing you have Linx Classic.

As said get them networked first, that's the hardest and most expensive part, then I would recommend a Red Lion G3 for a shop HMI. It is very powerful stuff, can talk over multiple serial and multiple ethernet networks and communicate with hundreds of different types of devices, even multiple protocols per port.

They are fast...way fast...develop fast, download fast, boot up fast..

They are reliable...out of the box accurate and precise touch cell calibration...I can type easily on the keypad of a G304K 4" screen so a G306A with serial ports, USB, CF card slot and Ethernet would be plenty big enough.

The programming is infinitely flexible and development tools are the best in class. Then, when the office folks wanna see databases fill up with production statistics, it can write to a database and log alarms to compactflash as well as FTP file sites on your company LAN.

Spend $1000 before your MS Excel through OPC puts your budget in the red with man-hours.

Or, blow twice that amount on other peoples' Windows based solutions to keep yourself at the mercy of the bubble gum and band aids for life...

Just my opinion.

Problem with our place is that the office folks all use Excel and they like using the graphs and whatnot that become available to them through data logging that is automatically stored to a common plant-wide directory. This way, office folks can feel like they know what's going on without ever stepping onto the (hot) plant floor.

Yep, I use Excel with some macros when I need to print a pretty version of the CSV datalogs. Windows based plant data collection is fine, but for a shop display, it's too much pain, too little gain...Now, if you get your guys trained to use RSLogix, then by all means go with a Wonderware or iFix or Ignition scada, and put programming tools on the machine as well.

There's our fix... Most of our electricians are still old-school and are afraid of computers.

A very select few of us are allowed access to programming tools on HMIs but we're moving towards VersaViews with customized Programs to allow On-The-Fly addition of buttons and advanced alarming... Pretty cool stuff but as I said before, most of our electricians are afraid of it.

Thanks for the input guys, its been a couple busy days in the shop but the project is started and weve got ourself a simple hmi program to start fiddling around on and given enough time its going to be a great project with endless possibilities.