Cookie-Cutter Rung Building Difficulties

Hi Guys,

In this thread from a couple of years ago, in post #11, TConnolly demonstrated a method of building rungs in excel, then using a text editor to make the string "Logix-Friendly".

I've got a project coming up where I will have several blocks of logic, anywhere from 25-60 rungs apiece, in a RSLogix 500 program. This is a very large program, and scan-time is already an issue (100-130ms!) so I don't want to use any loops if I can avoid it.

TConnolly's technique would be a life-saver, but I'm having trouble implementing it. No problem building the rungs in Excel. I am using Notepad++, and was able to replace the EOL characters with spaces easily enough, but have not been able to eliminate the tabbed spaces between instructions that Excel leaves.

Just looking for some pointers from the pros who have been doing stuff like this for years.

Thanks in advance! :site:

Cheers,
Dustin

First, in excel, select only one cell, then search and replace, and there should be options for special character searches. Maybe one of your sources contains a tab or was the first in a copy/increment activity, and they are invisble when viewed as a spread sheet?

If that doesn't pan out then it must be adding them when you save as...(Always save as, and choose txt or csv filetypes for this type of operation...)


Then, if they are still there, in notepad++ you can show and search/replace those characters, but you may want to instead, experiment with the export or save as possibilities in Excel. I think in most versions of excel you can control which field delimiters get used when you save as a csv file. The default settings may be affected by the way you open or import the non xls file...

I have had problems with excel modifying the content of files exported by crimson, by padding out all fields with a comma instead of using an EOL character, then Crimson balks at the file when it runs across 20 some odd commas in a row where they weren't before.

I have used Notepad++ to clean up that damage done by MS_Excel by search and replace the long string of commas with the right number copied from the export before saving with excel. So, if you can't get excel to cooperate, you may be able to quickly add a nonsense character where each "bad" tab/space exists, then search and replace the pair of characters in Notepad++.

Thanks for the suggestions. So far I have just typed the instructions and addresses into their own separate columns, incrementing manually for the first two rows, then using the auto-increment drag-down feature. I just selected all the populated cells and pasted directly into note-pad.
Perhaps the conversion between formats is where the extra spaces come from?

I tried find/replace in notepad++, typing in the number of empty spaces in the find box, and one space in the replace box, but that didn't work.

Okie, you're the man

I saved the Excel grid to a .csv, then opened that in Notepad++, find/replace "," with " ", then used Edit --> Blank Operations --> Remove Unnecessary Blanks and EOL, and voila! 50 rungs in 5 minutes. Gotta love it

Thanks again,
Dustin

Do you really need to duplicate so much logic?
This sounds like a good place for one or more AOI's.
100-130ms scan? That is insane for a Logix class processor!

He states that he is using RSLogix500, I did not know that it could use AOI's, I thought that was exclusive to RSLogix5000.

Alan

rdrast said:

Do you really need to duplicate so much logic?
This sounds like a good place for one or more AOI's.
100-130ms scan? That is insane for a Logix class processor!

Click to expand...

Agreed on both counts. The machine was installed about seven years ago, and they new then that the program was going to have thousands of tags, nearly a hundred routines with thousands of rungs, and yet they did not opt for a Logix 5k processor. You would think someone would have bench-tested such a program on a SLC5/05 before signing off on using one, but they didn't. Yeah, it's a real problem, it makes alarm handling a nightmare, of course timers are super-unreliable, msg comms are flaky, etc, etc. But management doesn't want to invest the $ or downtime to upgrade. They really don't care about scan-time issues, it's hard to make it tangible for them.

If you are in RSLogix 500, what's so terrible about using a library function, and doing an indexed import?
As elegant as the Excel thing might be, the library import function eliminates all the parsing nightmares, and does what it sounds like you want to do.

bmacattack33 said:

Agreed on both counts. The machine was installed about seven years ago, and they new then that the program was going to have thousands of tags, nearly a hundred routines with thousands of rungs, and yet they did not opt for a Logix 5k processor. You would think someone would have bench-tested such a program on a SLC5/05 before signing off on using one, but they didn't. Yeah, it's a real problem, it makes alarm handling a nightmare, of course timers are super-unreliable, msg comms are flaky, etc, etc. But management doesn't want to invest the $ or downtime to upgrade. They really don't care about scan-time issues, it's hard to make it tangible for them.

Click to expand...

You can quantiy that depending on the value of the process. With scan times over 1/10th of a second, that means all repsonses to I/O devices are limited to that much variation in response time.

It don't take a whole lotta tiny delay$ to justify a Compactlogix or Controllogix system with a 1747-AENTR is some processes.

This is the route we intend to take with a heavily loaded 64k 5/05 running 65 DeviceNet drives on two networks. We're going controllogix for the next conveyor expansion with three free slots and extra horsepower up front, then we'll redo the scada and PLC code and have the new L72 take over the whole grinding system replacing the 5/05 later. We may only get two slots and switch a few of the drives over to enet to get back to a single d-net network.