Red Lion Data Station Plus

Hello,

Anyone have any experience with the Red Lion Data Station Plus? We are looking at one and I was wondering if anybody had any feedback on the unit.

Thanks in advance for any input.

-Dave

I just finished a project where I used a DSP to send data between PLC's worked great, and extremely easy to setup.

Yep I've used them on many occasions. It's essentially a G3 HMI without the screen. (That's not exactly right--you can configure a display to be accessed through the web interface.)

It's great for protocol conversion and with the scripting capabilities you can accomplish virtually anything.

Do you have a specific application that we could address?

kolyur said:

Yep I've used them on many occasions. It's essentially a G3 HMI without the screen. (That's not exactly right--you can configure a display to be accessed through the web interface.)

It's great for protocol conversion and with the scripting capabilities you can accomplish virtually anything.

Do you have a specific application that we could address?

Click to expand...

Not really, I am just looking at getting into some data aquisition. Our technicians and supervisors take all the numbers manually. It would be nice to have cycle counts, down time etc. available on the network. I have 4 or 5 different PLC brands on the equipment and the Data Station Plus looks pretty user friendly.

Also we are currently building a new machine and I would have the opportunity to link it up in the shop, (as a test model so to speak),while we are still testing the new machine.

-Dave

Sounds pretty straightforward. The Data Station can log data to a CompactFlash card. There is a built-in data logging function that can log tag values based on either a time interval or a trigger signal, so it's pretty flexible. There are scripting commands to access the CF as well, so you can essentially make it do whatever you want, it's just a matter of how much time you want to spend with it. Data on the CF card can be accessed through the web interface or FTP. If you wanted to get fancy you could even make graphs and trends of the data on the "virtual" display that people on the network could view with a web browser.

I'd suggest that you download the Crimson programming software from their website and give it a try. At the same time you can make sure that it has drivers for all the PLCs you plan to connect.