Produced/Consumed tags have been around since RSLogix 5000 v1. You can easily make it work in this application, and for my money, I'll choose produced/consumed over explicit messaging (MSG instruction) any day of the week. With a MSG instruction, there are a lot more things that you have to get right, a lot more manual configuration to be done, and if you miss one thing it might kind of work or not work at all. My experience with produced/consumed is that there are just a couple of things to remember, and then it just works.
First up: create a UDT with enough space for all the data you can ever envision sending. Then double it in size. e.g. if you have 20 BOOL tags, 5 DINT tags, 10 REAL tags and 2 STRING tags, make a UDT with two DINT's for BOOL data (which gives you 64 BOOLS), followed by say 20 DINT's, followed by say 30 REAL's, followed by say 10 STRING's. A produced/consumed UDT can't be changed online, which is probably the main drawback they have when compared to MSG. But if you put a bit of thought into it before you set it up and give yourself plenty of spare space in your structure, you can mitigate it for 99% of scenarios.
Once your UDT is created, export it and import it into your other PLC. You could manually create it in the other PLC, but export/import ensures that it will be identical and there won't be any data entry errors.
Next, put the CLX into the 5069 Compact Logix's ethernet I/O tree, and vice versa. With the 5069 compact logix, this is easy - it knows about all of the old PLC's. You'll need to start by adding the ethernet module of the CLX rack, then the processor.
Adding the 5069 into the CLX ethernet tree is obviously not directly possible, because the older CLX doesn't know about the existence of the newer 5069 Compact Logix. However, if you get it "close enough", it'll work. Add in a 1769-L35E with the 5069's IP address. The 5069 will receive a message addressed to it, but structured for a 1769-L35E, and knows what to do with it. It will respond with the correct data accordingly.
Finally, create two instances of your UDT in both PLC's. Call them something like "CommsIn_FromPLC1" and "CommsOut_ToPLC1". The "CommsOut" tag will be a produced tag. The "CommsIn" tag will be a consumed tag, and you need to point it at the producing PLC, and tell it what the produced tag at the other end is called.
If it were my application, I'd have a play with this before getting too deep into MSG instructions. If you have to learn either option from scratch, P/C tags has a much shorter learning curve.
One final tip: because you're using one of the new-style 5380-series Compact Logix PLC's, there are some important caveats with using UDT's for communication with regard to how you structure those UDT's. This applies whether you're using produced/consumed or explicit messaging. Have a read through pages 96 to 102 of
this document for details. It is a bit wordy, but hopefully you can make sense of it enough to make sure you avoid the issue it describes. If not, post back what you're unsure of and we'll try to help further.
Good luck!
