Ahhh, now I got ya, Rick!
Well, actually, I did think of that originally.. but they are so behind the times where I work and Plc's. It's for a major corporation, they have a lot of money for this, but the maintenance manager/supervisor(s) (yes, plural, that big of a place...) don't seem to get the gist of how they should be setting up for documentation and how to get their mechanics to a position of troubleshooting. They literally are running the gamut of plc2's to new control logix, and even have modems, device net and dh+ running on several machines, but not connected to anything... a virtual playground for me...
Of course, they would like to network this all together, to monitor, they had PLC 5's networked on 2 lines and an ammonia system that went to a remote computer, so that's what they are 'used to'. Well, they never backed up a durned thing and the pc crashed, on top of that, it was a compaq.. I did mention it may be cheaper to do a data recovery off the hard drive (the hd was fubar), but they had all ready scrapped the machine, their IT department couldn't rescue it, so it was junk
Soooo, I come in as a mechanic/electrician with plc abilities and have this kinda dropped into my lap. I don't get a lot of time to play with it, since most of my job is 'putting out fires' and trying to document, they see me sitting with a laptop, trying to get in descriptors, and making backups, well, I'm wasting our time... I'm sure most of us know what that's like... Literally, I guessed it would take approximately 3 months to just get it so they can hook a laptop up to the plc's they have, hard copies, backups (on and off site) and some training for the current staff to at least hookup and get all the connectors they need.
After all that, have one laptop with windows 98, rslogix5 and 500, with rslinx. Then, one machine with a plc2. I've dabbled with the 2's before, but never got 'heavy duty' into them... That's when I posted my question. From my limited knowledge, I knew that you couldn't hook up 5 or 500 to a plc2, needed 6200 or AI, but thought I'd throw it out there... You guys rock at this stuff!
In the PLC game of life, I'm just a squirrel trying to get a nut. Thank you all for your help!
Hoot