AB Micro820 To SMC EX600 Enet Manifold

hello,


I would like to use an AB Micro820 PLC to control an SMC manifold. it will be the EX600 ethernet coms module with 7 valves and a 16 point input module. I dont have much experience with the Micro820 PLC and wondering if anyone could point me in the direction of how to do this. Can I just add an ethernet device like logix? or do i have to make a message.

Thank you

Welcome to the PLCTalk forum community !

The bad news is that this is not a normal supported function of the Micro 800 series controllers. They are not intended, advertised, designed, or supported to control remote I/O devices over Ethernet.

Rockwell has done some very limited user-defined function blocks for communicating with Rockwell devices from the Micro 820/850/870, but those are based on the controllers CIP Generic messaging capability (and the drives ability to accept those messages), not on a conventional I/O connection.

You might be able to write a set of repeating unscheduled Message instructions to the Assembly objects of the SMC EX600, or configure the SMC for Modbus/TCP and write to its control registers.

This is a nontrivial setup, and commercially you are likely to end up with a lot of finger-pointing.

Start by checking out SMC's documentation for the Generic Ethernet Module object with ControlLogix, which will tell you the Assembly instance numbers and their format, then have a look at the Micro 820's CIP Generic Messaging quick start:

https://literature.rockwellautomation.com/idc/groups/literature/documents/qs/2080-qs002_-en-e.pdf