PLC5 with FactoryTalk Studio

I am up grading a RIO 1400e terminal that is communicating to a PLC5 with BTW and BTR instructions. They are upgrading to a 7 Plus ethernet terminal. Part of the current terminal programming is taking interger words and converting to ASCII. The is done by the expression of B06 00/00-9/15. The B06 is the Block transfer number set up in the terminal. 00/00-9/15 indicates that the 0 word through the 9 word is to be used. Has anyone use a Plus 7 terminal and try to set up a string tag to use integer words

First: Welcome (back) to the PLCTalk forum community !

Next: you made a very good (and probably inevitable) choice to switch to Ethernet instead of trying to use an older PV+ hardware module that still supported RIO. All the re-addressing and graph paper and counting-on-your-fingers to convert octal to decimal is actually less hassle than trying to use the old RIO adapter for PV+.

Is the String data used as an actual STx:y string data type in the PLC-5, before it was converted into Integer blocks and used as the source for a BTW?

Or is it natively a series of integer words ? How is the Length encoded in that series of 16-bit words; usually it's the first Word, then each Word after contains two characters.


In PanelView Plus with PLC-5, you can display a String by manually changing the data file letter from "N" to "A", so your String Display connection looks something like

{::[PLC5Shortcut]A27:0,L20}

To my knowledge this works only with the PLC-5.

The other option is to go with native String datatype support, and move your data into an ST data type so it can be displayed on the PV+. I believe that's necessary if you are going to use a String Data Entry instead of just a String Display.