Recipe Implementation

Hi all,

There are several moving parts in my post, so I hope to express my question well enough. You may smack me if I fail.

I'm currently in the early design stages of a control system, the management-prescribed target of which is four identical machines, each of which will probably have a PanelView Plus HMI for recipe selection, process feedback, and so on.

In parallel with this, I'm trying to build a management system for *the* plant, as we've got .NET libraries to read and write data to Compact/ControlLogix platforms, which comprise the vast majority of systems in place. I want to tackle monitoring, alerting, data collection, and giving management the tools to update product specification, per process, on the fly. The system will be my testbed for implementing these features, so my hurdle is determining how to implement recipes with *minimal* involvement from the HMIs. If the built-in FactoryTalk recipe features are used, as far as I understand, they can only be updated at the HMI itself or by pushing an updated application any time the spec changes (I want to avoid both of these).

So...memory is abundant on the controller and an array of the recipe UDT containing current recipes and generous room for growth consumes a minimal footprint; is there a way to get the PanelView (FTView ME 6.10) to parse this recipe array into a selection list during run-time?

Thank you!

The way I always interface recipe selection on factory talk view is with a control-list selector. Each state is a unique position within the UDT array of recipes. I use a string "description" UDT member as the text of the caption for each state. The selector writes to a pointer for the array. The enter connection writes to a BOOL that is used to trigger a COP(Product_Database[Pointer], Active_Recipe, 1).
As for populating the UDT array, I usually use Excel and RSLinx DDE or a SQL table and stored procedure. I have never used Factory Talk recipe system and I plan to keep it that way.

Thank you for the helpful information, I will reply back with my results.

Replying back...

Thanks for the help, bmacattach33! I got the recipes implemented with very little hassle and they're working. It was tedious assigning each recipe to a state, but it beats the built-in recipe 'feature' by light-years.

edit: it didn't actually take me all this time to do this; projects sometimes sidetrack each other

Thanks for the follow-up. With the ever-present threat of the dreaded sidetrack hanging over our heads, posting follow-up posts to say "all is well, thank you" often doesn't make the cut. Glad to hear you got your system up and running