SLC500 vs ControlLogix

poiuy

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Join Date
Oct 2003
Posts
47
I'm a college student, and my current co-op is my first introduction to PLC's. The vast majority of the work I've been doing involves SLC500's, however, we have a ControlLogix setup in the lab for testing and learning purposes. Anyway, I was wondering where the ControlLogix gear fits into the AB line with respect to the SLC500. They're about the same size, have similar I/O modules, etc, so I was hoping someone could give me a basic explanation of how the two are different.
 
Thats what I'm asking about. I was hoping someone could give me a basic rundown without going into technical detail, ie. ControlLogix are cheaper, but dont have as many available modules, but can connect to the ethernet easily, etc.
 
Take a look here to see a quick comparison. If you burrow further into each processor you will see some of the main differences.
The CLX platform is a pretty significant step up in performance from the SLC series. The costs are relatively even, with SLC being somewhat cheaper. AB wants the world to go CLX so the price for that platform relative to the others will be come more attractive as time goes on.
The programming environment will look pretty familiar. However the data structure is quite a bit different. That may take some getting used to.
The backplane for CLX is not the master/slave setup of the SLC. It's basically a parallel version of ControlNet. As such it supports peer to peer as well as master/slave communications. So you can have two CLX processors in the same rack.

Dig in and have fun.
Keith
 
The CLX is the top of the class in AB PLC systems. It has huge memory, very fast processing capability, and communicates openly over a producer / consumer backplane. You can place multiple processors in a single chassis and have them share data or control. You are no longer forced to used canned data types such as integer or float. You can create user defined data types. Along with all this flexability come responability. You should throughly define you data structures and control before programming, or you will find it much harder to program a CLX to use its maximum efficiency. Hope this helps.
 
All the above is very helpful. There is another way to look at it.

The SLC500 was introduced in 1990 as a low cost and somewhat updated version of the PLC5. All SLC500's and their cousins the MicroLogix family are programmed with RSLogix 500.

It has been a tremendously successful product and continues to be developed. I would expect it to have at least another 10 years of commercial life.

Logix refers to an entirely new family of hardware products that are all programmed with RSLogix 5000 and was first introduced around 1999.

The flagship is ControlLogix. It is almost everything I want in a controller product.

The soft version is SoftLogix. Does everything ControlLogix does, plus more.

The distributed I/O version is FlexLogix. Based on the very successful Flex I/O family, it is popular in certain applications.

Embedded in a Variable Speed Drive it becomes DriveLogix. The PowerFlex 700S is a very competent drive.

The low cost version based on 1769 I/O is called CompactLogix. Lacks the full feature set, but in the long run will replace SLC500 in the market.

Fully integrated Logix based motion systems get called Kinetix.

Unfortunately AB launched the MicroLogix 1000, 1200 and 1500 using the "Logix" name, prior to fully formulating the above Logix family strategy, and they are kind of stuck with an inappropriate name for these controllers, because they are really part of the SLC500 family.

Hope this provides another way of looking at the "ControlLogix" product.
 
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An important difference between the old PLC5/SLC500 family and the new "logix" family are the networking options:

PLC5 and SLC500 typically have DF1, DH485, DH+, RIO and/or Ethernet/IP.

"logix" typically have DF1, Devicenet, Controlnet and/or Ethernet/IP

Both families can communicate on all the networking types, but the above stated are what is most "native" to each family.
 

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