I assume you got this working?- I sent you a PM a few weeks ago and I never heard back
JRW, I appologize. I was completely oblivious to the fact that you sent a PM. In fact, I have 12 of them spanning over a year that I was unware of, no doubt from others that I need to get started appologizing to.
Ironically, I just went back there today to finally get there machine up and running. It was "one of those" calls. This machine was bought from a German company and was a specical order for a company in Connecticut. The HMI is all in German. They only had photocopies of the prints, which were entirely in German. They did not have the development files for the S7 CPU or the OP17. They only had a photo copy of the progam (which was also commented completely in German, was only 60% commented anyhow, was not up to date with what was in the CPU, and was very long and poorly coded). And as I later found out, much of the program was not even relevant because they just took a program from a similar machine and hacked and wacked it until it worked. We called them and they claim to no longer have the program either. This is hard for me to wrap my head around because I have a copy over everything I have engineered from day one.
Anyhow, after sitting in a factory in about 105deg F with my laptop teetering on a barrel and using Google translator on my Droid to try and decipher the prints and program I finally went to the manager and said "I need to take this back to my office and spend a day commenting this so I have a clue what is going on."
So today I went back in and played around for a few more hours on the machine and found that the reason it would not work was that a bit was set in a routine that locked out any motion from happening. The first thing I did was cross reference it, and to my suprise there was only a Set, and no Reset for this bit. I then started looking to see if it might be reset at the word or dword level. Nope. Then I looked to see if it was possibly referenced indirectly or as an array. Still nothing. In fact, as far as I can tell, the original programmer left no means at all to reset this bit outside of hooking up a laptop. The only other possibility is that somehow the HMI is capable of resetting it, but I tried every feature and button available and nothing appeared to be linked to it. So ...... being able to upload the HMI is maybe even more important.
At any rate they have a working machine now and they are happy. I of course am not so happy because I can't figure out how they managed to get this bit set in the PLC and how they are supposed to be able to reset it without calling me in again. I hate not getting a chance to find root cause, but they were looking around for parts to run as soon as the things started spinning.
I did discuss backing the HMI image up with them again, but now that it is running I suspect they may let this fall through the cracks.
