Automatin Direct Changes Download

[Terry Woods]

testsubject said...
"...now using that code for first in/first out to select which head will dump next."

I'm sooo confused... ain't ya 'sposed to take a dump in the head?

BTW, Navy Style Coffee has that certain... ooohh, let's call it a nostalgic flavor... know what I mean? And it ain't Navy Coffee unless a spoon can stand on its' own. Of course, the question becomes... if it's black, why use a spoon? SAT!

Navy Style Coffee is the kinda stuff that keeps you bouncing off the walls! Then, of course, the only thing that can settle you down, so as to quit putting dents in the wall and various pieces of furniture, is to go home and apply a particular therapy. To those that are really "in the know", that therapy is commonly known as MGD.

And, of course... too bad for those that get in my way when I'm heading home for therapy. It's like... uhhh... uhhh... it's like... uhh... like a... medical... uhhh... emergency. Yeah! It's like a medical emergency!

(355) (LUEN)

 

[testsubject]

another navy flashback. It sounds like you are combining navy coffee and MGD and it is causing hallucinations...lol

 

[Peter Nachtwey]

The COB used to call it black and bitter.

More Navy lingo.

I still drink it that way only I use Arabica beans and grind them fresh. When I go abroad, the people alway like to show me how much better their coffee is than ours. The normal commercial coffee is inferior. However, we can buy the same beans as everyone else if we want to pay the price.

Terry, get off the MGD stuff. Treat yourself to a good micro brew. I think you deserve one for the shadow code post. It raised the value of the information of Phil's site.

Arik, I had a project in Turkey years back. I asked to try Turkish coffee but they always got me chai ( tea ) which is excellent. However, one day I insisted and it did taste like mud. It must be an acquired taste.

More seriously. I don't see why it is such a big deal to change ladder on-the-fly. I does require a little more work for the PLC designers and more memory. A program can be compiled into one big module. This is the easy way out. It will also execute the fastest as all the internal address are computed at compile time. To be able to edit the program on-the-fly, one must keep an array or linked list of pointers to rungs. As the PLC execute the ladder, it must fetch the pointer to each rung in turn an execute it. Now a new rung can be be inserted or an old rung replaced by just replacing a pointer. There is still a problem with allocating and deallocating memory. The S7 programmers know about compacting memory. S7s must allocate their internal program units by functions or function blocks which required bigger chuncks of data to be allocated or de-allocated. I am pretty sure Rockwell allocates and de-allocates a rung at a time which should be much easier to manage.

Being able to change code on-the-fly seems to be a hot topic. I know that some will not buy a PLC unless its program can be edited on-the-fly. I know that some of my customers will pay the extra money to get a SLC over a micro logixs because they feel they save enough time to justify the difference in price. Obviously these programmer are system integrators and not OEMs.

I find these posts interesting as we are adding PLC like capabilities to our motion products. It seams that the best of all world is to be able to edit on-the-fly and download code and data separately. Downloading data separately is easy too. I don't see why PLC manufacturers make it so difficult to both. It does take more code, processing power and memory, but the procesing power and memory are cheap. I am amused by the price that PLC manufactures charge for memory on some of the smaller PLCs. We are finding that the larger memories are cheaper because the smaller memories are becoming obsolete and more expensive due to lower supply.

 

[elevmike]

Arik,

I think I caught you working on the Shabbat; or at least thinking about it...

 

[Eric Nelson]

Hey Mike, I did a quick Google search to find out what Shabbat was, and oddly enough, one of the first links I found was THIS...

I also discovered that "Programming a PLC" is not one of the 39 forms of work prohibited on the Shabbat (LINK).
Arik should be fine, provided he does not get frustrated and hit his computer with a hammer (#38)...

beerchug

-Eric

 

[bernie_carlton]

Ahh, but would 'programming' not involve using electricity, which in the explaining notes is equivalent to fire? Unless, of course, the programing equipment does not use electricity. Even if he didn't use the computer he couldn't write down 2 characters of a program yielding at most a 1 character program. Granted that, while this is near my limit of complexity, it may put a crimp in anyone else's output.

 

[PhilipW]

It seams that the best of all world is to be able to edit on-the-fly and download code and data separately. Downloading data separately is easy too. I don't see why PLC manufacturers make it so difficult to both. It does take more code, processing power and memory, but the procesing power and memory are cheap. I am amused by the price that PLC manufactures charge for memory on some of the smaller PLCs. We are finding that the larger memories are cheaper because the smaller memories are becoming obsolete and more expensive due to lower supply.

As you allude to PLC memory is NOT the low cost RAM you slip into your PC for cents in the MB.

For a start it is static RAM not dynamic. Static RAM uses at least five times the chip area and is always more expensive.

Second it is low power battery backed RAM...more $$

Third it needs an Industrial High Temperature spec.....more $$$

Fourth it needs to be reasonably fast ....more $$$

Then the volumes used by the PLC industry for this reasonably specialised product are a tiny fraction of that used by the mainstream computer world....and this alone changes the pricing structures by many factors.

Finally PLC vendors then turn around and expect these low volume RAM chips to be made available for products with a 10-20 year life cycle....and as a low volume chip gets older...it becomes more expensive to source because there are fewer vendors competing to supply it...indeed there may be only ONE vendor...who is supplying it on their terms.

Newer generation products like ControlLogix use much larger memories, eg the 1756-L63 sports 8 MB ...although the battery needed to backup this much memory is no longer a single dinky on-board cell.

If on-line edits and the ability to do partial logic and data downloads is your nirvana...then I think RSLogix 5000 Ver 14 is going to deliver something close to what you are asking for. It is a non-trivial thing to allow major partial downloads to a running process...AND deliver rock solid security.

 

[elevmike]

Eric,

So I guess a Shabbat friendly elevator would be totally passave? We have an emergency dispatch system that will cause the elevator to run up and down and stop at all floors if there was a dispatch system failure. I wonder if invoking this on Saturdays would past muster?

On the face of it I think that bernie would be right about the fire/electricity analogy. That's what I thought at first anyway.

 

[ArikBY]

Well Mike you caught me.
I do not work on Shabbat, I am at home spending my time corresponding with you about PLC problems and most important coffee.
I am not religion so I don’t care to use computer on Shabbat.I would thrown to hell in the right day.
In Israel we work Sunday-Thursday so Friday and Shabbat (Saturday) is our days off.
Eric you surprised me did you know what is Shabbat before or just now?
The second link is great to explain the principles of the Judisam.
Any how I sure Mike never asked for Shabbat elevator. I guess that the first time he hear this term.
The emergency cycle for elevators cannot call Shabbat elevator because some Jewish rules. According to the Jewish religion you do not allowed to turn any electric power on.on Shabbat.
That include photo sensor or any switch ,so if the cycle start before Shabbat fully auto without any option that any person will turn any switch .That too tough for me.
The orthodox don’t use electric power from the power company because people work there on Shabbat.They use generators.The lucky that they are only 10% from our population.
I use to work for elevator company before 20 years ago so I know something about elevators and Shabbat elevators.and how crazy is it.

Peter

You worked for “faked Turkish” .In the middle east the mud coffee is the most common.
After you acquired this test you cannot drink the American coffee.
Good Turkish coffee can shake you all over.If you not use to that you better not drink that before you want to sleep.

The most important I picked the DL-06 this morning but I hadn’t any chance to use it yet.It too late for that today 10 P.M.

 

[elevmike]

Ahaa! There is such a thing as a Shabbat elevator!

Now I feel like a total idiot. I was thinking about this during with dinner with my Mom today. Years ago I remember my Dad, (then my boss) ask me about a Shabbat "option" for a elevator controller. I told him to give me some specs, and I'll give it a try. It never happened, so I thought he was joking with me. Also my kids go to a private school with about a 50% Jewish student body. One of the other parents also asked me about a Shabbat elevator. I rattled off specifications for a stairwell, (no more than 6" risers with no less than 11" inch deep steps, landings at no more than 8 ft apart) etc.. everybody laughed, and the converstation changed, so I also assumed he was joking also.

I now also understand another experience I had when I was a tech in the field. One weekend when I was on a service call a guy dressed in full garb (like right out of the book "The Chosen"), scooted onto the elevator with me. I apoligized to him because I had pressed every button to stop at all floors to check the floor levels. He chuckeled and said "That's perfect!". After a few stops he scooted off just as soon as the door opened, and thanked me. I looked at antother passenger, and he commented that it was the Shabbat. I always remembered that and never understood it until today!

A great deal of our customers are Jewish and nobody ever mentioned it to me in a professional setting.

About Coffee: We once had a engineer from Lebenon who made the coffee one morning on one of our annual canoe trips. He gave me about 1/3 of a cup. I asked him where the rest of it was. He told me I had enough for the whole day and then some. He was right; I had the jitters till about 3:00 pm.

Arik, Keep us posted on your DL-06 project. I have a DL-06 on my test bench and I am currently designing a controller around it, but have not actually put one to work because I needed more AC inputs. AD just started selling AC input option modules a few weeks ago for the DL-06, so my next job will use it. Actually the setup uses two units. One on the car, and one in the main control panel. I cant wait.

Bob, I've only been able to use the FIFO stack once, but it wasnt for an elevator. I just cant figure how it would help in elevators, but I have a possable project for a warehouse pallet retreval system that it may work well on.

Mike.

 

[testsubject]

Mike,

I originally looked at it as only an exercise but was excited when I discovered I could use it to improve my code...

Bob

 

[Sleepy Wombat]

PhilipW

If on-line edits and the ability to do partial logic and data downloads is your nirvana...then I think RSLogix 5000 Ver 14 is going to deliver something close to what you are asking for. It is a non-trivial thing to allow major partial downloads to a running process

Omron been do this for quite some time......

Arik
"The orthodox don’t use electric power from the power company because people work there on Shabbat.They use generators.The lucky that they are only 10% from our population."

So who turns on the Generator ????

 

[Eric Nelson]

So who turns on the Generator ????

Unless there's some kind of automatic "Shabbat generator" available, they might fire 'em up on Friday night and hope (pray?) that they stay running until Sunday...

And no, Arik, I didn't know what Shabbat was. But, now I do!...

beerchug

-Eric

 

[elevmike]

Guys,

The reason they use the generators is so they can shut it down on Friday evening. Remember no use of juice on Shabbat!

 

[ArikBY]

Hi
What I going to write here maybe will make you laugh or to think how idiot the Jewish are.
Just remember the Judaism is the oldest religion in the world and some people keeping this habits so many years to preserve it in the way it was.
Lot of things have a good reason even it look stupid.
Shabbat is very important because in that God rested after he created the world and the God said you need to rest in that day.
The Judaism have some streams like in every religion the orthodox have also some streams too.
According to the Judaism a Jew can use light, elevator,cook on Shabbat if someone who is not Jew made it ,So if you need medical help it better that not Jewish team will treat you.It maybe not good example because to save life according to the Judaism you allowed to break the rules of Shabbat .A same for the power company the orthodox think because they using the power they responsible that other Jewish people brake the Shabbat rules.
So they start the generator Friday after noon before Shabbat and shut it down Saturday night after Shabbat or use non Jew to do so.
So Mike in your case I sorry to say you was his bellboy.
AS I said most of the people here in Israel and me are not religions we are not work on Saturday. most of the shops are closed some malls, coffee shops, are open.
It look like Sunday in the States.
Most of us can called traditional that mean we are Jew believe in God ,keeping some rules that’s it.evry one in his own way.
Eric I glade you know something about Shabbat now, the link is very good to explain the Jewish principles.
I hope Phil will not cut this part Its PLC site not the place to preach.
Any how the DL-06 will have to wait few day my. schedule become very tied for the next 3 weeks maybe on Shabbat......

Mike just think, I drink about 10-15 cups, full cups of that coffee every day without sugar.
If you want to remember the test my business colleague will be in the States next week PM me your address I will send you pack. And preparation orders.