recipe and hmi question

Hello,

i am new to this forum but have checked in many times before for helpful tips but now decided to register to get some help of my own.

i have a few questions, first being: i am writting a program to control 2 motors in a mix tank. in the program i have a subroutine that is my mix cycle and in the main program i have the sequence that calls the mix cycle 5 times. in each step of my sequence, i have a move function that drops the run time into a RTO in the subroutine for the cycle. the main program resets the RTO after each cycle and places the new run time at the start of the next cycle. i have formulas that have different run times, can i use the RCP configuration file and RCP instruction to create a selectable database that can call up a formula and its run times? would it be done by storing integers that can be placed in the source parameter of the mov function when the recipe is called?

question 2: i am using rslogix micro starter lite and a micrologix 1100 plc for this project. what software would i need to create a HMI for this program with an AB panelview plus screen? would i be able to make a screen that has all my formulas where i would be able to select one and have its run times drop into the main program that runs my mix tank?

last question: besides using AB HMI are there affordable screens with affordable software that i would be able to use? i beleive that the AB software can get rather expensive.

thanks in advance
lbric

For small HMI applications, I strongly recommend the Red Lion G3 family of touchscreen terminals. They connect easily to Allen-Bradley controllers over serial or Ethernet networks, are very cost-competitive, and the Crimson 3 programming software is free of charge, powerful, and easy to use.

There are a lot of different ways to program 'recipes' in logic controllers. Certainly the MicroLogix RCP system is one of them, but it was created to allow large parameter sets to be stored in a slow memory section of the controller, to free up RAM for the user program.

How many different variables are there for each of your 'recipes' ? Sometimes it's easier to just store them in ordinary MicroLogix data files.

thanks for the tip on the HMI

i have about 10 different formulas each containing 5 run times. in my subroutine i have 1 retentive timer when the main program starts the first cycle a mov function places the run time in the preset of the retentive timer. when the next cycle begins the timer is reset and a new value is moved into the preset. this process happens five times. i think i can have a RTO for each cycle run time in the subroutine and eliminate the reset and mov from the main file if this can help me acheive my goal of being able to preload the preset values of the RTO for each formula.

i appreciate your help

You could use the mitsubishi E1000 series the ones E1032 upwards have recipe functions these are easy to use & the E-designer software is about £100.00 you can create recipes by populating a screen with the registers you need in the plc then read or write these to the internal flash memory they are stored in csv format and can be copied to & from the hmi to a pc for backup, there are recipe handling functions in the HMI

bump

parky said:

You could use the mitsubishi E1000 series the ones E1032 upwards have recipe functions these are easy to use & the E-designer software is about £100.00 you can create recipes by populating a screen with the registers you need in the plc then read or write these to the internal flash memory they are stored in csv format and can be copied to & from the hmi to a pc for backup, there are recipe handling functions in the HMI

Click to expand...

How do you perform the transfer of recipes to USB or over Ethernet?
I didn´t get any recipes when doing a Project Recieve... The HMI is an E1101
What am i missing here?

You have to use the HMI tools transfer utility, this should be on the E-Designer disk, however, I do not think it works on Win 8 > I do know it works on win7.
There is another way of saving recipes to a memory card i.e. USB stick, within the project It will copy all recipes to the USB (I think it can be done in reverse as well), in E Designer, click help, Do a search by typing in recipe then select creating & transferring recipes, so basically, you create a key when pressed it Runs a command "Save Recipes on Memory card" it copies all the recipes & recipe directories to the USB & I think you can do it the other way round, recipes are stored as CSV files so can be edited.
The HMI Tools has TCP connection but again think you need to use Win XP or Win 7.

Here is the one for saving recipes onto USB without HMI Tools