Peter Nachtwey said:
No, but I can imagine. I hated LM90 too. It wasn't the LM90 as much as the WASI board that was required. I learned to hate non-standard interfaces starting with the WASI board.
I think that you are thinking of the Series Six, it was the one that required the WASI board. The Series One required the DCU, and the 90's had a serial (RS-422) port (or ethernet). I've no idea as to what the Series Three and the Series Five used.
http://www.cimtecautomation.com/ge_fanuc.htm
Peter Nachtwey said:
I feel your pain since you are trying to fix the mess. From a company standpoint it is a self inflicted wound. I would hold the head engineer responsible too.
Yeah, but what are you gonna do? And I stand corrected, he wasn't fired, he was retired with a sweet buyout package. Hmmm, this gives me an idea....
Peter Nachtwey said:
That is big. What are you doing?
Well, the program controls a Ube injection mold machine, and I've been tasked with getting the PID loops tuned in so that the barrels are up to temperature in an hour rather than two hours.
Because the programmer used the same PID for all of the barrels, I'm having a bit of trouble in figuring out where the Setpoint, Process Variable, Gains, etc, are coming from.
And since VersaPro wasn't giving me every result for the register that I was looking for, I decided to print it to file and just search for it there.
BTW, the file ended up being 1.14 Gigs in size, and itself refuses to load in Wordpad, so that didn't help much.
And I just figured out why VersaPro couldn't find it. The guy who wrote the program named the register that I'm looking for "R19900". The actual register that he is using is "%R23900". I had been searching for %R19900 instead of %R23900!
That's why the references that I came up with made no sense. What a Jerk.
That's ok, I'm on the right track now.
Peter Nachtwey said:
Good, but it isn't quite the same situation. In your case only you are screwed. In my case all the people that want to configure Profibus DP must waste time figuring out how it is done. The first time Profibus DP was configured for our motion controller it took a Siemens engineer 3.5 hours to get it to work. That is way too long. Evetnaully a call to Johnson City, TN got the project on the way.
Ah, Siemens, they're currently on my sh*t list as well.
Tomorrow the Siemens rep and I are going to go over what replacement parts that we need from them, but so far they haven't been able to get me a size 4 (or whatever the IEC equivalent is) starter to replace the one that burned up a week ago.
Peter Nachtwey said:
On a postive note. I think I have got past the steep learning curve. I sent my example to my customer. I didn't implement LD [AR2,#P0.0]'s suggestion about making a record for the status and error bits but that will come. I will be OK as long as I keep using the Step7 enough so I don't forget the magic handshakes and mouse clicks.
Good luck, from what little that I've had to deal with Siemens, I see that it's going to be an uphill struggle all of the way.