I am looking at using this range instead of AB compact logix.
I have had a look at the software manuals and cannot find anything that indicates if this range supports some form of AOI / UDT similar to Logix 5000.
Has anybody used these controllers utilizing said functionality.
Thanks in advance.
Nope, but they claim it is in the works.
They're really pretty good little machines and the software is not bad for the price (free). They're have tons of memory and are really fast too. But... I am not convinced that they are as rugged as the other offerings. I have a few of them out in the field and have only had a couple of issues, mostly minor. I did have one failure of a serial port that was probably due to lightning. It is connected to RS485 and about 600' of cable buried in the ground so I added a signal isolator.
I am not sure I will put any more out there, but when the customer is on a budget and it is useful to put the free software on their machine for remote access purposes you can save a ton of money.
Things I love about them:
-Lots of comms ports, lots of power, easy to set up and communicate with. Modbus read and write instructions are superior to A/B stuff. You can talk to about anything with the PxK series.
-Analog modules with built in readouts that can show milliamps for all the channels.
-price...unbeatable bargain.
-bright OLED display right on the processor
-instruction set is somewhat simple but quite powerful. Debounce coils are particularly useful along with rising and falling edge "contact" instructions.
-firmware. the CPUs come ready to run out of the box, and firmware upgrades are easy to perform. The software will even reload the program into the CPU after you update firmware and all of it goes very quickly compared to A/B
Things I don't love:
-Bit numbers start at 1. I don't know why they did this but I actually hate this. Bits always always always start with 0. There is no good excuse for this horrible ugly flaw in my opinion.
-Window arrangement. It ain't RSLogix...You can only edit address descriptions from the tag database and it is in your way when it is opened. The help file is similar.
-Too many tag options. It ain't like A/B where everything is retentive and you can look at tag values online or offline. You get to choose which tags are retentive. You also have initial values, force values, initial force tickboxes...I still don't know for sure what all these extra features are good for, and not sure I understand what will happen if the battery is dead and I cycle power and I have written several complete programs. I had some tag value weirdness happen once, so I replaced some tags with constants to solve the problem.
I don't think they are as capable as Compactlogix. They only do ladder logic and don't support some of the more advanced abstractions or programming techniques, but depending on your situation, they might be more than capable for you.