Panelbuilder 1400e to PVP7 ASCII/String Display

Hello gentlemen,
A few days ago I was tasked with converting an old panelview 1400e to a panelview plus 7 application.
Everything went well except for the string displays.

The ASCII displays in the old PV point to a set of FLOAT addresses in the PLC, and they in fact display things like recipe names, etc.
Pointing to the same addresses from the newly developed PVP7 just displays the number stored in that address. Is there an easy way to fix or work around this?

Here's an example of the data that I have in the PLC:
F8[56] = 1.46696165e-019
F8[57] = 13.570386
F8[58] = 1.45800261e-010
F8[59] = 1.35701254e-019
F8[60] = 1.35631564e-019

The old PV displays something like: "02 - MAYO / 50"

Let me know if this info is enough.

Programmers did a lot of weird stuff back in the PLC-5 and PanelView Plus days.

Are you also upgrading the controller, or are you still using a PLC-5 ?

The programmer is packing ASCII characters into Floating Point registers. I'm not sure why they are doing that instead of using Integers.

If you copy those 32-bit Floating Point values into a register where you can see their values in hex, you would see this:


If you view those bytes as ASCII characters, they come out to

- 0 2
AY M
/ O
50

Click to expand...

I don't think there's a way to point FactoryTalk View at an array of REAL values and have it display them as a string. You're probably going to have to put them into an actual String datatype.

There may be some tricks and compatibility things I'm forgetting; I happily did my last PanelView 1400e migration project at least ten years ago.