I/O Status Screens on HMI

daba said:

and the data will always be "live", even if the controller is in program mode...

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Why would you need to see the IO if the PLC is not running?

cardosocea said:

Why would you need to see the IO if the PLC is not running?

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Commissioning, perhaps

Every one of our projects gets done with the IO mapping as it's saved much time from getting the laptop out if looking to see sensor status without opening the door. I have all of the IO data as DINT element in a UDT array. The UDT will also have an array of 32 strings for descriptions and a string for part number, location and address. HMI screen will have all of the bit indicators and string displays addressed to another seperate tag that has the same UDT. A hmi numeric input will 'browse' via indirect addressing into the array and display one IO card at a time on one single HMI screen. All of my plan and design of the machine is based in excel so it's only a couple clicks to download all the IO descriptions to the string tags.

I was thinking about this. Particularly because the AD Productivity Suite doesn't really have any kind of UDT option. I think you could follow a work flow similar to:


Create the IO in a certain way in your program
Export tags to form foo or whatever you use (xlx, text, xml, whatever)
Parse them in
Create HMI tags for your chosen HMI
Create strings from the IO comments / labels / whatever


The only thing I'm not sure about is how to go about creating a screen from that. It would be pretty platform dependent, I think.