Red Lion String

rjswagel said:

The other possibility, that I am going to test out, is that my string is buried in UDT within a UDT, I am going to bring it to the surface and see if I can write to it.

Click to expand...

I recall have a similar issue with strings on a Magelis HMI.
The string was a UDT attribute also.
Never looked at solving it, just made it a string tag.

Sorry, I got called away and could not get back online yesterday.

Okay, I am looking at the crimson file now and I am now seeing where you have any text data entry objects for the Downtime Entry fields. They're all set up as just Panels. I see where the touch action is set to write to a different tag for the Cause Code. I also see that the string tags are all set as read only.

Maybe I am not looking in the right spot...

EDIT: Okay, I was on the wrong page...I think I found in on the OEE Downtime Code Setup Page.

There are two pages with string data. Downtime_Code_Setup and Quality_Code_Setup. I have the tags organized by the pages.

String data write.

Okay, I will have to recreate a Logix5k file with those tags in order to test this...I have a used Compactlogix hanging on the wall, I haven't powered it up to check it out but pretty sure it is running a much older version of firmware and does work...and the phone is likely to ring any moment now and pull me away again...

I don't see anywhere that you are writing to OEE.DowntimeCodeSetup.Disc_1_Len

If I get time, I will set up the CPU and string tags and test with logic added to the Entry Complete trigger according to Ken's notes.

I don't have the .Len write in there, but the Tag is set up to always write 12 characters. I did use Ken's code which works fantastic. I also used his code to write some constants into the .Len. By doing so I was able to see that I was changing the length ok, but wasn't getting the data characters.

One more thing. When I used Ken's code it always returned a length of 0.

Okay, I can see that trying to recreate your UDTs is not going to be easy. Can you export the UDT definitions for me?

I have my Version 20 Compactlogix set up and working (which I needed to do anyway) and assigned it an IP address to match yours.

Okay, I guess I cannot get the 3.0 emulator to work with my Compactlogix at all. It works well with SLC and Micrologix...maybe I am missing a setting. It has been a few years since I tried to use the Emulator with a Compactlogix and maybe it never did work...I can't recall.

The only hardware (Crimson) I have handy is a CR3000 7". After lunch I will try to run a conversion and see how bad it butchers up the graphics going from a G3-10" to CR-7"

Again thank you for the time you are spending. My worst case scenario I will change those description from the PLC. The interval of change would be so few that the end user would most likely forget how and call me anyway.

I made some progress. Since I didn't have the whole matching L5K file, I stripped down the crimson file to what I did have recreated in my CPU. Until I did that, the Red Lion was complaining about comms loss. So I made a new file with just the OEE Down code entry page and imported the much smaller L5K file from my CPU.

Afterward, I was seeing blanks for text and I could fiddle with the length in Logix5k and even the characters and see nothing on the screen. After attempting to type in "TEST" on the HMI, RSLogix would show the length change to 0 and all null characters and still blank text on screen.

I found that the setting for the string tags under "Packing:" was set to "ASCII Little Endian". I changed that to "None". After doing that, I can write to the strings and see them on screen just fine, but the length always ends up as 12 characters...even with the Entry Complete action set...so either I messed up something or Crimson always thinks the strings are 12 characters long even when empty...

I can think of a slightly ugly way around this, but want to dig deeper...

I has seen two different program examples one with Little Endian and one with none. Thank you for your work.

Okay, I have it working by changing the Communications > Global Options > String Padding back to "NUL". I do have the code for each entry object set up with the Entry Complete action writing to the LEN element of each description item.

EDIT: Attaching an updated version with those fixes for you to try out with Crimson 3.0

I also fixed an untranslated program that was giving a warning and quickly applied the same changes to the quality codes page...let us know if it works with version 32.