Does anybody know anything about the IMC 110 card?

Have a customer with a single axis CNC machine. It's fairly simple. The system is a SLC 5/03 with a Panelview 550, an Ultra200 servo drive. The SLC interacts with the servo drive via a 1746-HS card, otherwise known as IMC 110. This card has a very large cable that connects it to a breakout board, which the leads from the servo cable connect to.

The issue I'm having is the homing. The IMC has certain words mapped to the SLC memory for status indication, commands, etc. So the card being in Slot 1, the address for say, home, is I:1.1/5. From what I can tell, even though it's a CNC it's not even doing position control, just straight velocity control.

The problem I'm having is that when the homing limit switch is physically made, I have power on the terminal on the breakout board, the LED light for the Fast input on the breakout board is lit up, but if I'm online with the PLC the bit associated with home does not change to 1. What will then happen is the servo will drive the apparatus past the homing switch into the overtravel limit switch, breaking the E-Stop loop on the breakout board, and causing an E-Stop fault in the IMC. When this happens, the OEM smartly decided to force the Panelview to stay on the Homing screen and not allow the user to reset the fault and jog the servo down. The ball screw must be physically decoupled from the motor and manually spun to get it off the overtravel. In order to avoid this, it requires manually moving it with the Control Panel in UltraMaster, which is on my laptop, 40 minutes away from the customer in my office most of the time. They don't have any capability of getting online with anything.

The kicker is this doesn't happen consistently. I'll get there, hook up, and it wll work repeatedly. I'll even cycle power and it will come back from a power up. I had the customer check the limit switch, and they said it's okay. Like I said I checked voltages at the terminals on the breakout board and those are also behaving predictably.

My only recourse is that there might be something wrong with the IMC or the breakout board, or the cable in between, but all of them are in a fairly clean panel and aren't moved a whole lot. I called Rockwell TechConnect and support for these is not included in the Toolkit, and when I mentioned the module to the rep, he said, and I quote: "never heard of it."

I feel like the IMC modules are like secret agents. If they're discovered, the home office disavows all knowledge of their existence.

The SLC interacts with the servo drive via a 1746-HS card, otherwise known as IMC 110.

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Have you searched the Rockwell Literature Library to see if there is a manual for the 1746-HS module? I bet there was at one time, if it is not considered obsolete.

I did find a 1997 1746-HS configuaration document with some wiring diagrams (6th document in the list):
http://search.rockwellautomation.com/search?client=literature&site=literature&output=xml_no_dtd&proxystylesheet=literature&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en&getfields=*&filter=0&as_q=&num=10&btnG=Search&as_epq=1746-HS&as_oq=&as_eq=&sort=date:L:d1&ulang=en&ip=98.81.100.149&access=p&entqr=3&entqrm=2&ud=1&q=+inmeta:xlanguagefull%3DEnglish&dnavs=inmeta:xlanguagefull%3DEnglish

I have a client who is using them - 3 Per SLC and 2 machines with them on

I "Inherited" them from a previous SI who went out of business and have not had to touch them in 3 years.

I maintain them and do not reprogram them -
Software is ODS (Offline Development System) - Find a SI who has the REVs from many, many years ago is how I got hold of the program (Serial maybe with a PIC - Dos or win95 platform)

Manuals that may assist
manuals
1746-pm002 Install Manual
1746-pm003
1746-pm004

8520om-um051 ODS user Manual

1746-um613 1746-HSRV User Manual

They are also programmable via a HHT (hand held terminal) Good Luck in finding one
Also good luck in sorting out the issue

I would recommend upgrading to something more configurable, it sounds like you could do some discrete wriing between the SLC and the Servo Amp and skip the IMC, right?

Anyhow, I would at least pursue allowing reversing away from the overtravel limit fault without all the pain you described. I saw the post and thought of Creonics IMC, integrated motion controller with which I am familiar, but we accessed them through RIO, programmed them with text, and code generated in a dos app called Accel.
I believe this is entirely unlike your hardware.

OkiePC said:

I would recommend upgrading to something more configurable, it sounds like you could do some discrete wriing between the SLC and the Servo Amp and skip the IMC, right?

Anyhow, I would at least pursue allowing reversing away from the overtravel limit fault without all the pain you described. I saw the post and thought of Creonics IMC, integrated motion controller with which I am familiar, but we accessed them through RIO, programmed them with text, and code generated in a dos app called Accel.
I believe this is entirely unlike your hardware.

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That's how I would design it, but there's nothing on the breakout board to tie them into to make them work this way. The switch is wired in series with the E-Stop loop. And there are no other loops that prevent direction in a certain way.

The more I look into it, the more I believe the thing was just poorly designed from the start. Descriptions in the Panelview are poorly worded (the overtravel error message is "IMC 110 EStop"), and from what I've heard the machine has had this problem from the get-go.

I had a customer years ago with the same issue.
we put the system in the middle of the slide and said home the unit. we tried the home limit switch as the unit was homing and we got a signal at the terminal. i tried everything, finally backed up the plc program, powered the unit off, reseated all cards and power supply 2 times and powered it up.

the problem went away.

there evidently was a bad connection on the backplane.
you might want to give it a try.

regards,
james

James Mcquade said:

I had a customer years ago with the same issue.
we put the system in the middle of the slide and said home the unit. we tried the home limit switch as the unit was homing and we got a signal at the terminal. i tried everything, finally backed up the plc program, powered the unit off, reseated all cards and power supply 2 times and powered it up.

the problem went away.

there evidently was a bad connection on the backplane.
you might want to give it a try.

regards,
james

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Good idea. Although I have reseated the IMC card but not the processor. The Backplane is part of that path. They haven't called for over a week, but if I end up back out there, it'll be the first thing I do.