Serial DH-485 on SLC-5/05

Dear members,

I have an upcoming field upgrade of a pump station to add a RedLion gateway and serial radio equipment. The ultimate goal is to pipe some tags to a main data collection station.

The pump station PLC is a SLC-5/05 (1747-L553E) processor. There is an existing PV+600 (can't recall exactly) that is connected to port 0 on the PLC.

I need to connect the RedLion to port 1, the ethernet port, but I do not have any details on the configuration of this port or perhaps it wasn't configured at all. Having very little experience with the SLC platform, I wasn't able to connect to the PLC.

I know that the serial port is configured for Serial-DH485 based on the PV communication setup. I went through many of the serial based drivers in Linx and two AB serial cables, still no luck.

Any advice on getting the serial comms up and running would be greatly appreciated.

The best way to connect an SLC-5/05 and a PanelView Plus 600 is to connect both of their Ethernet ports to an Ethernet switch, and carefully label the ports with their IP addresses.

Whoever built your system chose the least convenient, lowest performance method of connecting the serial ports together using Data Highway 485 protocol over RS-232 wiring.

The only practical way to connect to an RS-232 port configured for DH485 protocol is to use a 1747-UIC, which is a USB/DH485 interface.

On older Windows XPSP2 (or SP3 with a special patch) you could use a built-in serial port and the 1747-PIC/AIC+ driver in RSLinx Classic. This disadvantages are that this was tricky to configure, does not work in RSLinx Enterprise, does not work with general-purpose USB adapters, does not work with virtual machines, and does not work at all in Windows 7 or later operating systems.

If it were my system, I would try to connect to the SLC-5/05 Ethernet port, and add a small Ethernet switch so you have fast and easy access to the PanelView and the SLC-5/05 and the Red Lion.

In my opinion, it's very easy to connect to the SLC-5/05 Ethernet port.

If you have basic experience with Ethernet cables and IP addressing, that helps a lot.

There's no default IP address for an SLC-5/05. A controller whose Ethernet port isn't connect to anything is probably still set for BOOT/DCHP, so you can run the BOOTP/DHCP Server Utility that comes with RSLinx Classic to configure the Ethernet port.

There are dozens of threads describing this, but we can take it up step-by-step if you're game.

Ken - I agree with your point on Ethernet over DH485 and I have explore the option of running Boot/dhcp to configure the Ethernet port, but the Mac did not show up. There is one thing about boot/dhcp that I may be misunderstanding - the network settings. My version of boot/dhcp requires default subnet info, which in this case I do not know. Would this effect the outcome of boot/dhcp?

When a controller makes a BOOTP/DHCP request, it's able to accept any valid IP address, subnet mask, and default gateway setting.

So you set up the Network Settings in the BOOTP/DHCP Server to match the network that you want to use.

If your computer is using, for example, "192.168.1.10" with subnet mask 255.255.255.0, and default gateway 192.168.1.1, go ahead and set up the Network Settings in the BOOTP/DHCP Server utility to use that subnet mask and default gateway.

It's also possible that the SLC-5/05 Ethernet port is configured for some unknown fixed IP address, rather than BOOTP/DHCP.

That's harder to figure out. You can try to go online via the other port (which is challenging, in this case) or you can try to sniff out the IP address using a protocol analyzer like Wireshark.

Do you have a off line copy of the program? if yes you can see the IP settings in the program, you can also reset the CPU back to factory default and then use BOOTP, you would just click get info and enter the numbers after BC on the ethernet card, note: resetting the CPU will delete the program in the CPU

Just trying to think of other options

I don't have the original program nor any details who modified it last. I will give Wireshark and IPscan a try tomorrow.

Thank you all.