Testing distributed I/O

I have a customer asking me to do some testing on non Rockwell I/O. They want to see if it will work. Thats simple hookup a PLC, put the IO in the tree and its done.

What other test can I really run? Wire the Outputs to the Inputs, fire an output and look for the input to respond.

Its a digital IO for now.

If you've got a local relay output handy, you could run a powerup time-to-connect test. Write some logic to run it a hundred times and give them some statistics.

Do a "what happens to the input data when the device is disconnected" test. Observe what happens on re-connection too.

Do a "what happens to the output points when the PLC is disconnected / faults / goes to PROG mode" test for all three modes.

Do a physical pulse-catching "do output points come on, even for an instant, after a power cycle and before the output connection is established with an OFF output value ?" test.

Wire an output to an input and capture the output and input data states with Wireshark to measure round-trip performance.

If there are configurable features for the I/O modules, experiment to find out if they require a cold power cycle, a Reset command, or just a disconnection / reconnection in order to take effect.

Ken I ASSuME you've done a few of these tets over the years. You whipped them out fast.

Third-party device integration and testing was my favorite part of my job back in the Rockwell days.

Some of the guys down the hall at Fives did torture testing with ControlLogix, Baluff IOLink, and a bunch of IO-Link sensors for Stellantis. They came up with ever-expanding truth tables and a bunch of weird scenarios.

Probably the weirdest one was setting up a contactor to power cycle the networked I/O blocks once per second for 24 hours. They also ran a bunch of VM's with RSLinx browsing the I/O blocks all at the same time to make sure the I/O connections still got re-established.

If you want to get nerdy with EtherNet/IP "quick connect" (which I have never gotten into) this might be a good opportunity to do so.

If you want to expand your test scope (especially if you're looking for a change order) see if there are any CISA vulnerabilities for that product and see if you can run recommended tests on them.

A thorough TCP port scan and an SNMP "walk" report is a good way to pad the analysis as well.

As Im setting at home recovering from Chemo I try all of the above test. Thank you.