I need an example of Ascii conversation...

TheWaterboy said:

Fair enough. Encouraging to know its not just me struggling. I will look into other options.

Click to expand...

Yeah, misery LOVES company, eh?

My first choice for this application would be a Red Lion DataStation Plus.

In particular I love that you can create an application in Crimson 3.0 for the G306 and emulate it on your PC, then convert the project to a DSP and run it there (they don't directly emulate the DataStation Plus).

If you find yourself doing 3rd party to A-B interfaces often, and you can justify a small budget expense, just buy a DataStation Plus.

Red Lion actually sent me one about 8 years ago as a thank you for solving a different problem for them, and I still use it for prototyping. I bought a dozen just like it last year because that's the unit I already had, and because the customer had a 36-hour window for assuring them I had tested a prototype.

Get the DSPLE version at least; it has the embedded "virtual HMI" which is super convenient for troubleshooting.

If you can swing a couple hundred more bucks, get the new generation high-performance DA30D unit so you can try out any of the sophisticated OPC-UA, IIoT, or SQL features, and you have the convenience of USB host and SD cards on a modern small-footprint platform.

Ken, will this DSP setup do the ascii command, listen for response and act on that response without PLC interaction? If you recall an older BBS application called Procomm Plus and its ability to script using Ask... WaitFor... thats the ideas here.