Brand new to SLC 5000 with project

Hi all, I'm an industrial electrician with a problem. I have been using SLC500 for years with basic functions, and have just started a new job where the only PLC's are 5000's. To top it off, they use devicenet, which I have never used before. I am eager to learn about this, but have a project they would like to do and I need your guys help to walk me through the process. They have a Panelview 1000 connected to a 5500 processor through devicenet. They use this tell the PLC what product to run by inputing the data manually. They would like to add a scanner to input all the data automatically. Please let me know where to start and what I should start reading up on to figure out how to do this. I will warn you guys, I am a beginner with PLC's. I know this is way above me right now, but with your help, I'm hoping you guys can bring me up to speed. This will be a long thread, and I'm sure I will be asking for a lot of examples to help me wrap my head around some of the things you guys say. Thank you all, and I look forward to hearing from you.

What do you mean by scanner? Like a barcode scanner?

Basically, the existing panelview they have now will be directly writing to tags in the PLC. For example, if they are currently getting a user to store a number the panelview will be writing directly to that number in the PLC. All you would do here is find out what that tag is and write to it with the new device in the same way.

But how you connect the scanner is another thing. I can't really help you in configuring it.

Rockwell have heaps of good manuals, so I would start with their DeviceNet one to learn a bit more about it. What I would do after that is look at their existing system and see how they have set that up and probably do something very similar for the scanner.

Just a word of warning, your employer picked the worst possible way for a Panelview to communicate to a PLC. DeviceNet relies on packed writes to Input and Output Buffers which must be different memory locations. What that means is that you can't have a single tag in the Panelview that is read/write. It's either reading a value or writing a value, which is a pain to manage on numeric entry type fields. I did a setup like this once and swore never again. If you can, convert to Ethernet/IP, DH+, CN or even RIO...Anything but DN for a panelview.

robertmee said:

Just a word of warning, your employer picked the worst possible way for a Panelview to communicate to a PLC. DeviceNet relies on packed writes to Input and Output Buffers which must be different memory locations. What that means is that you can't have a single tag in the Panelview that is read/write. It's either reading a value or writing a value, which is a pain to manage on numeric entry type fields. I did a setup like this once and swore never again. If you can, convert to Ethernet/IP, DH+, CN or even RIO...Anything but DN for a panelview.

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I second that! I did a job with a DN PanelView. Limited words to used and the values were multiplexed depending on what page you were on. I had to add one small thing. It was a nightmare. something that should have taken a minute, took an hour to find an acceptable address space.

JPCCDD, congratulations on the new job and welcome to the Forum.

Let's start by discussing the specifics of the operator interface, the controllers, and the scanner.

"PanelView" is a name for several different families of Allen-Bradley operator interface devices. If it has DeviceNet it's probably an older PanelView Standard, but it might be a PanelView Plus. Ideally, post the complete and exact part number.

The "5000" series of Allen-Bradley controllers are called ControlLogix. If you can get the exact part number, like "1756-L55" or "1756-L61", and the firmware revision, that will help folks know what features it has.

Describe in detail exactly how an operator inputs the product data manually now. Does she type in values to a numeric input object, or press a number of selector buttons, or something else ?

Ok folks, sorry about the misinformation, I was going by what I was told. I looked at the setup and it is a Logix 5555 cpu with the RS232 in use by a printer. The panelview 1000 (2711-T10C20X) is connected to the PLC by ethernet. The HMI has a RS232 port available if that helps. As far as punching in information, there are set fields for length, width, etc.. and they punch in the number value. The setups of all the product being made are stored. Meaning they could look up the product using the panelview and select it. Hope this helps. I appreciate all the help and hopefully you guys can point me in the right direction.

Still not really clear on what you're trying to accomplish....

Are you wanting to continue to store the setups in the PLC and only select them via the scanner instead of a numeric product code they are using now? Or do you want to scan all the setup info too and store that in the PLC?

robertmee said:

Still not really clear on what you're trying to accomplish....

Are you wanting to continue to store the setups in the PLC and only select them via the scanner instead of a numeric product code they are using now? Or do you want to scan all the setup info too and store that in the PLC?

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I would like to pull the existing setups via scanner. So instead of them manually punching in the values or looking up the existing values that are stored, I want the scanner to pull them automatically.

Okay, so you want to do away with the stored "recipe" method using the PLC and the PanelView, and encode this information in a barcode.

The PanelView's serial port won't be of any help to you, as this is an older "PanelView Standard" where the serial port is used only for upload/download of the application program or for a serial printer.

I would recommend a DeviceNet to ASCII or EtherNet/IP to ASCII interface to connect to your barcode scanner. There are a variety of devices available for this purpose, with a range of cost and complexity.

Do you have a barcode scanner chosen yet ? Do you have a barcode format chosen yet ? Does the PLC system also need to be responsible for printing the barcodes ? Do they change often ?

If this were my system, the first thing I'd determine is how much data we're encoding into the symbol.

A typical barcode like a UPC sticker is 2 inches wide and only encodes about 10 characters. A similarly-sized 2-dimensional Version 4 QR code can encode about 50 characters.

So let's figure out how much data needs to be encoded and how it will be represented, and continue from there.

The barcode has 3 letters and 6 numbers. We have not chosen any hardware yet, and are totally open minded. Thank you for the help and please let me know what the next step is.

Okay, so you're looking at a product barcode like "ABC123456". That would fit on an ordinary UPC or Code 39 or Code 128 barcode symbol easily.

Earlier in the thread you said you wanted the system to:

[...] instead of them manually punching in the values or looking up the existing values that are stored, I want the scanner to pull them automatically.

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My guess is that right now there are stored recipes in the PLC, where they are identified by a code or number, then there are multiple pieces of data (length, width, etc) that go along with each code or number.

When you say "pull them automatically", do you mean that the PLC needs to get the length and width data from the barcode symbol, or that the data will be stored someplace else, like in a database ? Or do you want to stick with the PLC-stored values and just select them based on the barcode value ?

The reason I'm asking for detail on how the system is going to work is that the amount of encoded data determines what barcode type you're going to use, and the code type determines what barcode reader capability you need. No sense buying an expensive long-range 2-D QR reader when all you need is a cheap UPC scanner. And vice-versa.

The next step is to determine how many data elements there are and where they need to be stored.

The material sizes and information is stored, but there may be multiple orders for different lengths. Which means even if they pull the stored item, they still have to input qty., and length. I would like the information to be pulled from the barcode as well. Now as for where its stored in the the controllogix, that is where I really get lost. I'm hoping that you can walk me through where to find them, and how to access them with the scanner. Thanks again for the help, and lets see where we can go next. Thank you.

JPCCDD said:

The material sizes and information is stored, but there may be multiple orders for different lengths. Which means even if they pull the stored item, they still have to input qty., and length. I would like the information to be pulled from the barcode as well. Now as for where its stored in the the controllogix, that is where I really get lost. I'm hoping that you can walk me through where to find them, and how to access them with the scanner. Thanks again for the help, and lets see where we can go next. Thank you.

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No offense, but we are struggling to understand what you are wanting exactly. It's a combination of industry semantics that I think you are misusing so we are assuming wrongly. And then you seem to be adding detail that wasn't clear to begin with. For example, you say that each product is an 8 digit code of three letters and 5 numbers. Ken assumed as I did early on, that you have all the particulars stored in a PLC for this code and you just want to select this stored set of instructions based on a code. But now you add that you want quantity and length on the barcode. Well, that isn't part of the alphanumeric code is it?

Not trying to be harsh, and we are trying to help, but you have to be as detailed and up front about the parameters of this job without trickling out information along the way.

So, to that, what exactly will be encoded on the barcode?

From what's read on the barcode, what information must be obtained from elsewhere (stored recipes)?

From what's read on the barcode, what information will be used directly in machine setup (quantity)?

As for your question of where the information is stored, more than likely it will be in a large array in the control logix. Could be an array of UDT's like 'Recipe' where each subset of the Recipe tag defines all the parameters. Or it could be an array of just integers where each integer means something. Could be a multi dimensional array, where dimension 1 is each product and dimension 2 are all the parameters associated with that product. Without a copy of the CLX program it's hard to say.

We're definitely at the stage where we'd have to see the PanelBuilder32 and RSLogix 5000 project files to figure out more about the system.

If you're comfortable posting them, go ahead and compress the files into a ZIP file and post it to the Forum. If you're not comfortable making the project files public, you can put them on DropBox or some other file storage site and send Forum private messages to the users who are participating in the thread.

Search for user dmroeder for a DropBox referral we all pile onto, if you don't have an account already.

Once we see and discuss what sort of numeric entry data is on the PanelView screen, we can discuss how to replace those numeric entries with a barcode scanner.