Powerflex 525 Ethernet

[righteous818]

Good Day Guys,

I currently have a set up with 4 pieces of a 22-comm-e with 20 powerflex 4. I would like to move away from the daisy chain structure and convert to 20 powerflex 525 over ethernet. The compact logix user manual suggests that the maximum is 32 nodes on the ethernet driver. I am well below this with probably being 26 nodes at max. Do you all see any problems with this set up or had experience setting up so many ethernet drives?. Thanks

 

[Helliana]

It highly depends on your exact model of Compactlogix. Older models have limits by the number of network connections and could create an issue depending on the number of HMIs, messages, other io, etc used because some devices created more than one connection.


Newer ones are limited by the number of nodes, so you are less likely to run into issues operating close to their limit.

 

[righteous818]

I have a Compact Logix 1769-L35E, I have one main HMI, and 2 Sub HMIs and 2 sub plcs which read products names. Do you think what I am proposing with work?

 

[dmroeder]

From what I remember, the L32/L35 models counted actual connections rather than simply nodes in the tree like the modern controllers do. So even though you have 26 nodes, some nodes can make multiple connections. Check the L35E's web page for total number of connections used/observed.

 

[righteous818]

I did not know that the L35 web page can be accessed with showing data like this. Do I just access the ip address? I did not see any indication of this in the manual

 

[dmroeder]

I did not know that the L35 web page can be accessed with showing data like this. Do I just access the ip address? I did not see any indication of this in the manual

Yes, you type its IP address into your web browser. It has some useful statistics.

I realize now that you haven't set this up yet. I would be a little worried that the number of connection could be exceeded. I think Rockwell has, or used to have an Ethernet I/P capacity tool that I think was intended to help figure this stuff out. Apparently, rather than simplify things in their firmware (as they do now), they decided to write a program to help figure out the convoluted mess of "how many devices can I actually communicate with".

 

[righteous818]

I have checked my CIP connections with the laptop connected its at 12 Connections. I checked the number of devices on the network and they total to 12. So if i remove 4 of my 22comme modules. I should be ok connecting 20 drives? Let me know your thoughts thanks