Data transfer from USB to Compactlogix

Guys,

I have to design a Compactlogix system which takes ASCII data from an Ethernet feed, chops it up and sends it to different fields in a laser label printer. This I can cope with and don't have too many problems with. However the customer wants a backup system, where he can put all the data to be printed in a text file on a USB stick. Is it possible to use the USB port on a PanelView HMI to transmit a text file to the PLC? If not any other ideas would be greatly appreciated.

The PLC's USB port is only for programming support.

Not sure about the HMI, you may be able to add a ActiveX control to use it.

If you're talking about a PanelView Plus terminal, the USB port is intended principally for human-interface devices: keyboards and mice.

But in version 4.0 and up firmware, most USB storage devices formatted in FAT16 format will be recognized by the PanelView Plus as an external removable storage device. The Windows CE Path is something like "[root]:\External Storage2\"

Unfortunately, the PanelView Plus doesn't have good filesystem support in the application; there's no simple way to "open a file, parse the data, and hand it over to the PLC communication driver to be written to the controller".

Yes, this could be accomplished in an ActiveX control, as long as that ActiveX was compatible with that build of Windows CE and can connect to RSLinx Enterprise. In ten years of PanelView Plus, I have seen only a couple of third parties write ActiveX controls that run on them.

The HMI option I'm familiar with that has good support for removable media and good filesystem parsing support is Red Lion Crimson 3. A G3-series HMI is an excellent alternative to PanelView Plus.

My customer is pretty instatant on PanelView of some sort or other. I've been told that the other possible option is to use FTP from a desktop PC. Is that practical?

The modern PanelView Plus terminals do support FTP, but that just changes where the text file is stored: it doesn't get you a way to move the data from the text file into the logic controller.

I have never seen an implementation of FTP onboard an A-B controller.

Having thought about this a little more, I'd like to recommend you take a look at the Recipe ActiveX control.

Its basic function is what you're looking for: take data from a CSV file and write it to PLC registers on command. It supports both REAL and STRING datatypes but not any of the Integer datatypes.

The format of the text file will have to conform with what the ActiveX control requires, rather than being a free-form file that you're parsing.