zielker
Member
Hello!
My name is Richard and I'm hoping to pick the brain-trust here about the Eaton ELC and which Allen Bradley PLC is most comparable. I'm a tooling designer and we use a lot of PLC's in our weld fixtures, assembly tools, and work holding tools. I'm new to electronics and PLC's and the company I work for just lost our most valuable PLC resource to a new job at another company. It looks like I'll be needing to get up to speed really quickly and I've been looking for training opportunities. I've only found one training source for the Eaton ELC, beyond Eaton's technical phone support, but I've found a lot of support for other PLC's such as Allen Bradley, namely Ron at PLC Bootcamp. If anyone knows of another resource for ELC training that'd be great, too.
After speaking to Ron, I really feel like his course would be the best to learn the troubleshooting skills that I'll be needing to diagnose issues on our existing tooling, but of course we don't use the same brand of PLC so there would be some differences. I was wondering if anyone has experience with the ELC modular series and perhaps the SLC-500 or the ControlLogix and maybe they could give me a rough comparison on which would be closest. The ELC models that we use are the ELC-PB14NNDR and the ELC-EX16NNDR expansion module. If I attend Ron's training I'd obviously have to select which series and it would be helpful to know if either of those two Allen Bradley lines are comparable in the least bit.
The ELC has been good for us because it's relatively cheap and the software is free, but it's tough to get support or training when we need it. That being said, at some point we are considering going away from the ELC and are considering the Allen Bradley. Our assembly lines currently operate on some form of Allen Bradley, but we outsource programming to an outside source, it'd be nice to bring that in-house. I understand that you have to pay for the software for Allen Bradley. Can anyone give me some cost estimates on what you all pay for the PLC controller and an expansion module from either the SLC-500 or ControlLogix line? The ELC PLC we use has 8 inputs and 6 outputs and we can add 8 outputs and 8 inputs per expansion module so we'd be looking for something comparable in I/O. Also, anyone have an estimate they can throw out for the programming software cost for either the SLC-500 or the ControlLogix?
Thanks a bunch for the help, looking forward to utilizing this forum a lot in the future!
My name is Richard and I'm hoping to pick the brain-trust here about the Eaton ELC and which Allen Bradley PLC is most comparable. I'm a tooling designer and we use a lot of PLC's in our weld fixtures, assembly tools, and work holding tools. I'm new to electronics and PLC's and the company I work for just lost our most valuable PLC resource to a new job at another company. It looks like I'll be needing to get up to speed really quickly and I've been looking for training opportunities. I've only found one training source for the Eaton ELC, beyond Eaton's technical phone support, but I've found a lot of support for other PLC's such as Allen Bradley, namely Ron at PLC Bootcamp. If anyone knows of another resource for ELC training that'd be great, too.
After speaking to Ron, I really feel like his course would be the best to learn the troubleshooting skills that I'll be needing to diagnose issues on our existing tooling, but of course we don't use the same brand of PLC so there would be some differences. I was wondering if anyone has experience with the ELC modular series and perhaps the SLC-500 or the ControlLogix and maybe they could give me a rough comparison on which would be closest. The ELC models that we use are the ELC-PB14NNDR and the ELC-EX16NNDR expansion module. If I attend Ron's training I'd obviously have to select which series and it would be helpful to know if either of those two Allen Bradley lines are comparable in the least bit.
The ELC has been good for us because it's relatively cheap and the software is free, but it's tough to get support or training when we need it. That being said, at some point we are considering going away from the ELC and are considering the Allen Bradley. Our assembly lines currently operate on some form of Allen Bradley, but we outsource programming to an outside source, it'd be nice to bring that in-house. I understand that you have to pay for the software for Allen Bradley. Can anyone give me some cost estimates on what you all pay for the PLC controller and an expansion module from either the SLC-500 or ControlLogix line? The ELC PLC we use has 8 inputs and 6 outputs and we can add 8 outputs and 8 inputs per expansion module so we'd be looking for something comparable in I/O. Also, anyone have an estimate they can throw out for the programming software cost for either the SLC-500 or the ControlLogix?
Thanks a bunch for the help, looking forward to utilizing this forum a lot in the future!